Siva Power

Siva Power, Inc. is an American solar power company that develops thin-film technology. The company designs and manufactures copper indium gallium deselenide (CIGS) photovoltaics^[1] and is the recipient of a US Department of Energy SunShot Initiative award for manufacturing technology and was the only thin-film solar module manufacturer awarded in its category.^[2] Siva Power is based in San Jose, California and is led by Brad Mattson.

History

The company was originally founded in 2006 as Solexant (one of the founders was Paul Alivisatos) and was developing cadmium telluride (CdTe) technology to create solar panels.^[3] After the Chinese began dumping silicon solar panels and the American thin-film market worsened,^[4] the company decided to pivot and in 2011 hired current CEO Brad Mattson to take Solexant in a new direction, which he restarted in 2012.^[3][5] Mattson put the company into stealth mode and ramped up the R&D budget to find a different technology and process for manufacturing solar modules. In 2013 the company reemerged as Siva Power, developing CIGS photovoltaic technology.

Technology

Siva Power’s deposition technique is co-evaporation, which deposits the CIGS compound alloy film by direct reactive condensation of vapors of its constituent elements (copper, indium, gallium, and selenium) onto the substrate, for which Siva Power uses glass.^[3] Siva Power’s differentiation is its manufacturing equipment technology and processes that will allow production of modules at high speed and large scale, thereby enabling low cost.^[5] This technology operates at a far faster rate than normal, which means that the initial production capacity of a single line would be 300 megawatts of modules per annum, whereas typical pilot production lines tend to be 5 to 30 megawatts.^[3]

Department of Energy SunShot Initiative Award

The US Department of Energy SunShot Initiative is the government’s effort to make solar power cost competitive with other forms of electricity by 2020 by funding innovative companies’ research, manufacturing, and market solutions to bring down the cost of solar power.^[6] In 2014, the US DoE announced that Siva Power was the only thin-film solar panel manufacturer to win an award under the SunShot SolarMat2 category for driving down the cost of manufacturing and implementing efficiency-increasing technology in manufacturing processes for solar modules.^[2] The manufacturing component Siva Power is building through the SunShot award will have a 12x higher areal (e.g.: m2/min) manufacturing throughput than other state-of-the-art CIGS deposition tools, enabling a fully automated CIGS deposition system at a 3x reduction in Capex, labor, and overhead cost.^[7]

Team

When Siva Power came out of stealth, it also announced that energy-security expert and former Director of the CIA James Woolsey had joined its board of directors.^[8] Shortly after, Siva Power hired Dr. Markus Beck, former Chief Scientist of First Solar and Solyndra, to be Siva Power’s CTO.^[9] Robert Wendt, former CTO of California-based XsunX,^[10] joined as Vice President of Process and Equipment Development.^[11] Dr. Billy J. "BJ" Stanbery, former CEO and founder of HelioVolt, joined Siva Power as President in March 2015.^[12] Siva Power announced in May 2015 that Chris McDonald, a factory operations expert from Applied Materials' Solar Business Group and Intel, would become its COO.^[13] In 2016, Siva hired Bruce Sohn, former President of First Solar who was instrumental in driving First Solar from startup to billion-dollar company, as its Vice Chairman of the Board.^[14]

Technical Advisory Board

Siva Power has also assembled a technical advisory board composed of Dr. Rommel Noufi, Dr. Charlie Gay, Dr. Markus Beck, John Benner, Dr. Bulent Basol, Scott Thomsen, and Dr. BJ Stanbery, all photovoltaic and materials experts. Noufi was the Principal Scientist of the CIGS technology group at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and is a consulting professor at Stanford University.^[15] Gay was the former director of NREL and served as President of Applied Materials Solar Division.^[16][17] Benner is the Executive Director of the Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium, an industry-led consortium managed by Stanford and UC Berkeley charged with funding next-generation PV research at US universities and national laboratories with funds from both the US DoE and its industry members, and Basol has more than 30 years of experience in photovoltaics, beginning with Monosolar, one of the first solar companies.^[18][19] Scott Thomsen is a glass materials expert who ran Guardian Industries global glass group as the company President, having previously served as the company's Head of North American glass operations and CTO.^[20]

Funding and Acquisitions

When the company was Solexant and developing CdTe technology, it had raised $60M over 3 rounds of venture funding from X Seed Capital, Acero Capital (formerly Olympus Capital), Medley Partners, Birchmere Ventures, Trident Capital, Firelake Capital, and DBL Investors.^[21] In 2011, Solexant acquired Wakonda, a solar startup based in New York.^[22]

Since Brad Mattson took over the company and restarted it as Siva Power to develop CIGS technology, the company raised $7M in 2015 in series D preferred equity investments from DBL, Medley, Acero and the city of Wuxi, China.^[23][24] In 2016 the company again raised a series D investment of $5M.^[25]

References