Ascent Solar, a thin-film pv solar company, today rose 4.49% on a "transfer of contracts" from I.T.N. energy systems. A transfer of contracts by the way is also called a "novation" which is a legal term for transferring rights and obligations in a given contract over to another party. What's interesting here is that this novation has given Ascent Solar $3.5 m in government funding and research contracts.

This is a small company with big plans. This year they aspire to launch their 1.5 MW thin-film plant (tiny!) which they hope to rapidly upscale to 100 MW by 2010. The company's target is to reach 5 cents a kilowatt hour from the current 20 cents a kilowatt hour with its building intergrated photvoltaics (BIPV).

What makes this solar company different is;

i) they see an application for their technology in space, near space as well as commercial and residential BIPV applications
ii) they use copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS) instead of amorphous silicon
iii) they produce the CIGS cells on high-temperature plastic substrate. These plastics - they claim - can survive the manufacturing temperatures associated with thin-film CIGS processing while remaining flexible and electrically insulating

Well, my view is, good luck to them. But the road to low cost solar power is long and littered with roadkill. The thin-film solar is still under 5% of world solar demand - principally in Germany where I suspect thin film makes an even lower impact. BIPV companies who believed that a continous manufacturing run would bring down solar costs and maximize demand have been disappointing e.g. Solar Intergrated Technologies. Despite record silicon prices that ought to shift demand to to flexible low or non-silicon solar, the demand has yet to appear. Will Ascent Solar really be different?

Let's see.