GE Energy Financial Services and VantagePoint Venture Partners have joined North Bridge Venture Partners, Hanwha Chemical and Ventizz Capital Partners in an $8.4 million extension of a $20 million funding round backing 1366 Technologies, Lexington, Mass., which has developed a radically new process to create silicon wafers for PV panels.
1366 Technologies' process reduces the current cost of manufacturing solar panels by 65 percent. Manufacturing solar cells involves four capital-intensive steps that waste up to 50 percent of the high-cost, ultra-pure silicon raw material. The new “direct wafer” approach reduces the four-step process to one and produces wafers directly from molten silicon. Details
About the Author
Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.