The government will guarantee debt to help the company deploy a manufacturing process called Direct Wafer, which the DOE says could reduce manufacturing costs 50% by making wafers directly from molten silicon, rather than starting with solid silicon ingots that must be cut into wafers and smoothed.
“This single innovation could bring the cost of solar electricity down to between the costs of coal and natural gas,” writes Arun Majumdar, director of DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, which provided $4m of early funding for 1366.
The
