Green Power

Nanosolar's product is still in the test phase, and the Mini-Labo isn't designed for large-scale production. So after a few feet of foil have spooled out of the machine, Robinson leans in close and adds a bit more of the solution to a reservoir, using what looks like a small eyedropper. Nanosolar chief executive Martin Roscheisen chronicles the test with a camera.

If it seems simultaneously high tech and hand-to-mouth, well, that's life at this low-key company headquarters, adjacent to the Palo Alto dump. Roscheisen is a successful Internet entrepreneur who sold his previous company to Yahoo for $450 million. He and Nanosolar embody the new ethos of Silicon Valley innovation, postbubble: less hype and more concern about wringing the greatest possible value from every dollar. He financed the company with a combination of venture capital and government grants. And he created a frugal corporate culture that aims to get the recipe for its new solar cells right before it moves into full production.

The purse strings may be tighter these days, but the ambitions are still big. Along with industrial giants such as Sharp, Kyocera, and BP, Nanosolar is after the solar industry's golden ring: a reliable photovoltaic cell that can produce electricity from sunlight at a cost that is competitive with electricity from the existing power grid. According to Roscheisen, it costs roughly 32 cents to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity using existing solar-cell technology. (One kilowatt hour is about enough juice to run one dishwasher cycle.) That's about three times the cost of electricity purchased from the local utility, which was likely generated by a plant that burns coal, oil, or natural gas. "Our eventual goal is to generate electricity at less than the grid cost," Roscheisen says, although he concedes that the company's early products won't hit that mark everywhere in the world.

Sunlight is free, of course. The added cost comes because it's still so expensive to manufacture solar cells relative to the power they dribble out. To solve that problem, Roscheisen wanted to get a sense for how solar cells were being made and what breakthroughs academic researchers were achieving. He visited factories around the world and spoke to researchers at Cambridge University, Sandia National Laboratories, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Stanford. He discovered that one new approach to producing solar cells involved "printing" them in much the same way magazines like this one are printed: by rolling a flexible sheet through a machine, layering on liquids, and then drying them, eventually yielding a sheet that can convert photons into electricity.

Roscheisen funded the company's early research himself, and with angel investment from friends such as the founders of Google, but eventually he decided to raise $6.5 million in venture capital. The company received an additional $10 million in research grants from such agencies as the National Science Foundation, the California Energy Commission, and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Roscheisen decided to focus the company on creating solar cells that would be used on the roofs of buildings and by utilities that wanted to generate vast amounts of electricity. "That's the largest application area today, and we can come in at a much lower cost, with easier installation," he says. Nanosolar's product will be 100 times thinner than conventional panels that are placed on rooftops, and weigh one-twentieth as much.

Next year, Nanosolar will set up a factory for a first generation of solar cells slated to hit the market in 2006. But first, Roscheisen knows, Nanosolar has to perfect its recipe and figure out how to crank out large quantities of high-quality cells. With big rivals breathing down its neck, there's not a moment -- or a dollar -- to be wasted.

On the Road to Hydrogen

Kyo Hattori is standing in a parking lot, gushing about the hydrogen-powered Nissan he drove yesterday. "It was smooth and quiet," he says. "Very nice."

What's odd about the praise is that Hattori works for Toyota, Nissan's archrival. "We at Toyota felt strong stimulation from the back," Hattori says, poking me emphatically in the spine with his forefinger.

Here at the California Fuel Cell Partnership in West Sacramento, engineers from car companies and fuel distributors such as Shell and ChevronTexaco are working in tandem to define some of the standards and procedures for fueling, operating, and maintaining fleets of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. And though the garagelike work bays that belong to each automaker are off-limits to competitors, one important element of the collaboration is the regular chance to test-drive one another's vehicles to see how the latest generation performs.