Solaria Solar Cell Revisited Redux

Solaria Corporation relaunches website with recent Press Releases providing a bounty of new information.

While there was voluminous coverage of recent announcements by Solaria Corporation regarding Solaria Secures Solar Cell Supply Agreement for 1.35 GW, Announces $50M Series C Round and Q-Cells AG increases presence on the US market, there hasn’t been much coverage about the technology. For example, a notable Wall Street Journal article, Solaria Panels Win Backing Of Germany's Q-Cells (read in full here without a subscription), by Leila Abboud, is typical of mainstream media and Press Release editors.

Or at least until the revamped Solaria website is investigated.

The most recent website addition is Plastic surgery - Solaria Corp. fuels high hopes with low-concentration approach by Garrett Hering. This a PHOTON International article reprint about Solaria from the recent July 2007 issue (PI 7/2007, p.76-78). Please note this article predates the recent investment and solar cell sourcing agreement. An old RED HERRING (VIDEO): INTERVIEW WITH SOLARIA CEO SUVI SHARMA from April 2007 reinforces the news in the PHOTON article and from other sources.

Information about Solaria’s Management Team, Board of Directors, and Investors is located at the WHO WE ARE tab. Solaria provides a certain level of detail about their technology, process, and partners. In fact, Solaria will even let you Take a look at photos from our pilot production facility.

On the partner page, I believe the manufacturing services partner logo and link should be to Ionics EMS, Inc. (SIN:I10), not a unit of GE Water Technologies. DISCO CORPORATION (TYO:6146) appears to be the supplier of the customized solar cell strip cutting equipment shown in the PHOTON article. In addition to Q-Cells AG (FRA:QCE), PV Industry value chain partners include BP Solar and S.A.G. Solarstrom AG (FRA:SAG).

For those interested in learning in depth about Solaria’s solar cell and module technology, three key Solaria international patent applications have been published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

(WO 2007/033308) METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR ASSEMBLING A SOLAR CELL USING A PLURALITY OF PHOTOVOLTAIC REGIONS

(WO/2007/014288) METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR MANUFACTURING SOLAR PANELS USING AN INTEGRATED SOLAR CELL USING A PLURALITY OF PHOTOVOLTAIC REGIONS

(WO 2006/133126) METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR INTEGRATED SOLAR CELL USING A PLURALITY OF PHOTOVOLTAIC REGIONS

Since I wrote Solaria Supercell Revisited, it appears the “Super” part of the cell moniker has been dropped, but I still classify this as a follow up post.

And Valleywag has the latest Red Herring news including a link to a parody publication, Dead Herring.