Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe is part of the board of a MIT spinoff created to reach the long dreamed target price of $1 per watt for the energy resulted from solar power. The company is called 1366 Technologies and has recently raised $12.4 million from North Bridge Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners (Metcalfe is an associate at the last one) to build a startup plant that uses solar cells in Lexington, Massachusetts.
The company will not aim at making breakthroughs in the solar power field, focusing on developing the current technology instead. The target will be to improve silicon cells by combining two manufacturing technologies, which will have as a result an extra 25% efficiency in the process of converting light to energy.
This technology was developed by Ely Sachs (photo), professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and creator of the ’string ribbon’ commercialized by Evergreen Solar. The goal of the new-founded company is to produce solar energy with costs of only $1 per watt, at which price it will be competitive to the electricity obtained from coal.
Silicon is a nontoxic, reliable and well-understood material and one the new technologies expected to be used soon is called ‘grooved ribbon’, a method of wiring solar cells together. This way, the light reflected from one solar cell will be used by another one, already improving the energy obtaining process with 8 percent.
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