Twin Creeks Aims To Cut Solar Panel Cost In Half

Twin Creeks, a start-up company headquartered in San Jose, CA, aims to revolutionize the solar industry by combining old Soviet technology and newfangled American innovation to enable the production of flexible, ultra-thin solar cells at half the cost of the current industry standard.

Twin Creeks is doing this by selling copies of its first, and to date, only, product: Hyperion, a room-sized particle accelerator that slices off wafers of silicon, the most common ingredient in solar cells, at the molecular level.

To that end, Twin Creeks aims to offer manufacturers a way to bring down the cost of solar cells — those are the constituent parts that make up a solar panel — from about 80 cents per watt to 40 cents per watt.

The process is called “proton-induced exfoliation,” and Twin Creeks compares it to a “proton knife,” albeit an extremely fine and precise one, capable of slicing sheets of materials ranging from silicon to diamond into 20 micron-thick segments, about half the thickness of a human hair.

“Proton exfoliation was a phenomena first discovered by the Soviet Union in the 1980s,” Twin Creeks spokesman Michael Kanellos, in an interview with TPM. “They found that in their nuclear reactors, the steel walls around the reactor cores were deteriorating because hydrogen ions from the reactors were getting under steel.”

The technology eventually made its way into scientific literature and was used to create semiconductors that are found in most modern electronics.

Flash forward to 2008, when Siva Sivaram, a former executive manager at SanDisk and Intel, now Twin Creeks’ CEO, began reading papers on the subject. He and his friend, physicist and venture capitalist Alain Harrus, began to think about the various novel ways that the technology could be used.

“Nobody had ever thought of it to make really thin solar panels,” Kanellos told TPM. “But they did.”

The duo quickly recruited an army of experts on the technology, many of whom had retired decades earlier.

“There’s more people in the company with PhDs than not,” said Kanellos, of the 75-person strong staff. “The joke within the company is the age spread goes from 23 to 82.”

On Wednesday, after four years of secertive internal testing on two different and armed with 20 patents or patent applications, Twin Creeks announced it was offering the first copies of Hyperion for for sale on the commercial market beginning immediately, for a price somewhere between $1 million and $10 million (the company declined to specify). The company is demonstrating the process to interested parties at its plant in Senatobia, Mississippi.

To be clear, Twin Creeks’ prospective customers aren’t individuals, but other existing solar manufacturers, who have been hit hard lately by a sudden drop in the price of polysilicon, a type of silicon that’s used in the majority of the solar panels around the world.

Twin Creeks’ Hyperion proton accomplishes this by drastically improving the efficiency when it comes to converting polysilicon or other types of materials from thick, crytalline ingots, which is how they are first synthesized, into the thin wafers necessary to make solar cells.

Currently, the industry goes about the process in a blunt force sort-of way, physically sawing wafers off of the ingots with blades, which produces lots of wasted materials.

But Hyperion “saws” wafers off ingots on the molecular level, shooting hydrogen ions (aka protons) deep into whatever material the solar manufacturer is using to make their cells, forming microscopic bubbles. Heating the material then causes the bubbles to expand to a precise amount, lifting an ultra-thin, ultra-flexible layer right off the original ingot. In this way, the original ingot can actually be re-used over and over again to produce solar wafers at the precise thickness of 20 microns, up to 10 times, according to the company’s tests.

The process also allows companies to use far less material to begin with, thanks to the precision of the proton gun’s “cutting” abilities.

And with Hyperion able to accomodate a number of different types of materials, from polysilicon to gallium arsenide, its not hard to see why the company is already been talking about providing the technology to “a large number of the top 10 solar manufacturers in the world,” along with dozens of up-and-coming companies, according to Kanellos.

“We expect that there will be 6 to 10 of these in the field a year from now,” Kanellos told TPM. By 2014, the company expects to have over 100 in the field.

But that’s just the beginning of what Twin Creeks wants to do with Hyperion. Eventually, the company wants to use the same technology to make cheaper LEDs and image sensors in the cameras increasingly found in mobile digital devices.

And as for the question of just how green a high-powered particle accelerator can really be, Kanellos said that Twin Creeks spent many of its early years dialing down the power consumption to its current level: 1.2 megavolts, close to the level of a power transformer.

“The gun takes a lot of juice,” Kanellos confirmed to TPM, “But you’re also using one-tenth the amount of silicon to make the wafers as conventional processes.”

Kanellos said that the savings in materials more than made up for the power consumption. It normally takes 2 years worth of operation for a solar cell to work off its carbon footprint, but Twin Creek’s process takes only 25 days.