Lighting up the $1 trillion power market

Silicon Valley has changed the world once. Now, thanks to a wave of investment and innovation in solar power, it’s on to the next revolution: A massive disruption of the U.S. electricity market.

There’s a missile-bunker vibe you get when walking into Solaicx, a Silicon Valley startup that manufactures the silicon wafers that are the building blocks of solar panels.

In one half of the nondescript Santa Clara warehouse, three men sit hunched on a wood platform 8 feet above the cement floor, their eyes locked on two monitors. The screens show data and video gathered from a 24-foot-tall steel tower. The tower begins in a squat, gourd-shaped base and tapers to a cannon-size column with a long drum spinning slowly on top. Thick power cables snake down its sides. Another sci-fi-looking tower rises up off to one side of the building.

Inside the tower that has everyone’s attention, molten silicon is being added to a thin, 8-inch-long rod, or “seed,” of silicon. After 15 hours of precise spinning and pulling, the seed will grow to a mirror-finished ingot about 4 feet long and weighing more than 150 pounds. If it’s perfect – and that is the point of Solaicx’s cutting-edge technology – it will form a single crystal matrix, which is then trimmed and sliced into 1,000 wafers that sell for $5 apiece and are used by companies like General Electric (Charts) to build the most efficient solar modules on the market today.

An $11 billion solar energy market

Bob Ford, Solaicx’s CEO, bounds down from the platform and brushes a hand along an already cool ingot waiting to be cut into wafers. His finger stops on a thin seam running laser-straight down the side of the overgrown crystal. “That’s what you want to see,” Ford says. “It means every atom is aligned. I’ve had guys literally knock on our front door asking if we can supply them with $5 million worth of these wafers a month. We can sell as much as we can make.”

Business 2.0 Magazine