Nanosolar Ships First Panels
by Martin Roscheisen, CEO Nanosolar
After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.

We are grateful to everyone who supported us through all these years and the many occasions where there appeared to be mile-high concrete walls in our path; the unusual intensity and creativity of our team deserves all the credit for achieving this major milestone today.

Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:

• the world’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;

• the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;

• the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;

• the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;

• an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.

Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.

Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today. [auction canceled].

Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

[These are obviously not the first three we ever produced – we have produced loads for testing – but these are the first three of what we consider our commercial panels.]

Popular Science magazine — which many of us read when we were little — just came out with its annual innovation awards.

Our solar electricity technology was named the top Innovation of the Year 2007.  Ranked #1 overall, we even came out ahead of the Apple iPhone and many other great technologies (and companies with much larger marketing budgets too in particular).

It’s great to see our hard work — and greentech in general — recognized so enthusiastically!  Now we have no choice but to actually make sure that there’s going to be a solar panel on every building in the future.

 

What’s your stock symbol? How can I invest?

A few words of an answer to this very frequently asked question:

We are presently a private company and therefore have no stock symbol and no shares available for purchase by the public.  In fact, in the past, we have very carefully controlled our selection of investors, and it has been very good for us as a company to work with such a distinguished group of long-term committed stakeholders.

As to the question of when we might offer shares to the public, our board of directors has not yet had a chance to discuss this; we’re simply too focused on product development and company building right now.

In general, note that silicon cell manufacturers (whether based on crystalline silicon or equally capital-intense vacuum-deposited silicon thin films) require so much capital per MW of production capacity that they pretty much have to go public as quickly as they can.  Nanosolar is different: Our technology is extremely capital efficient and has such a low cost structure.