PRESIDENT OBAMA: Next we need to encourage American innovation. Last year we made the
largest investment in basic research funding in history – (applause) – an investment
– an investment that could lead to the world’s cheapest solar cells or treatment that kills
cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched. And no area is more ripe for such innovation
than energy.
(Music.)
ELY SACHS: The way the majority of photovoltaic solar panels are made today is by building
a photovoltaic cell. So this thing is built on a silicon wafer. And so this is an example
of the multicrystalline silicon wafer.
In today’s industry-standard process you take very highly refined silicon, and you
melt it in a big pot to produce an ingot this large. You then saw the ingot to smaller ingots
like this. You then – and this is the hard part – saw that smaller ingot with wire
and abrasive into the wafers. And in the process of that sawing, you make silicon dust like
this, which has to be thrown out. You cannot economically reclaim it. And the net result
is that the wafers that you produce – the cost of those wafers accounts for almost half
of the cost of the complete photovoltaic module.
What we do in direct wafer is, we cut out lots of these steps. So we start with the
same purified silicon. We melt it in a pot, but we form a wafer directly. And that wafer
is ready to go right on to cell processing. There’s no sawing or no surface treatment
required.
The way you can think about what we do is imagine a lake at the beginning of winter
where the ice is beginning to freeze, and you have a thin layer of ice. Imagine you
reached out and you grabbed that thin sheet of ice. But now imagine that that lake was
made of silicon at red-hot temperatures, and what you reached out and grabbed was a thin
sheet of silicon. That’s essentially what we do.
FRANK VAN MIERLO: So as you can see, we have an open office plan.
The ARPA-E funding was very important for us because it allowed us to work on the most
risky of all our projects, which potentially is going to deliver the largest cost reduction.
So the direct wafer program potentially can reduce the cost of wafers by as much as 70
percent. So that would be a big step forward for photovoltaics in – as a whole and will
create real manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
Investing in manufacturing technologies like we are developing here is the best way of
keeping manufacturing jobs in the United States because that is what’s going to build a
core competence that allows you to compete with other places in the world. And that’s
the same – exactly what the ARPA-E funding is allowing us to do.
SECRETARY OF ENERGY STEVEN CHU: I am so proud of the group of people that we’ve been able
to recruit for this ARPA-E project because in the end it’s the quality of the people.
We’re asking people to swing from the heels. Sure, there will be some failures, but there
will be some home runs and a few grand slams. And with those grand slams, we can really
transform our energy choices. That’s what ARPA-E is about.