For a small company, Natcore has had disproportionate media coverage.
As we’ve evolved, so has the nature of the coverage.
At first, the story was about an ambitious young company rowing against the tide to keep our technology in the U.S. That story received national attention from American consumer news media, e.g., The New York Times, ABC World News with Diane Sawyer, Fox & Friends, and Fox News, among many others.
As we’ve evolved, and moved closer to commercialization, so has our coverage evolved. We still hear from American consumer media, but now we also get inquiries from respected trade journals in Korea, Belgium, France, and England, as well as the U.S. And now the story is about our science instead of our Don Quixote-like quest to grow an American industry. That’s a welcome development, as it has also led to communications from the manufacturing community around the world.
It is our unique technology that has brought us this worldwide notice. For example, here’s a recap of our most recent developments:
· We’ve been granted an exclusive license agreement from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) to commercialize black silicon. (NREL is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.)
· Our scientists have created “absolute black” silicon wafers, the blackest solar cell surface ever created. They have a reflectance of only 0.3%.
· We have been invited to jointly present a technical paper at the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Conference in Austin, TX. We co-authored the paper with NREL.
Our progress with black silicon is so significant because it alone could increase solar cell efficiency by as much as 3%. More importantly, black silicon cells will also achieve dramatically better performance in the mornings and afternoons and on cloudy days. They could easily increase the total power output of a solar array by as much as 10%. All this could be achieved while reducing the cost to manufacture these cells. We feel that every solar cell manufacturer would be forced to adapt our patented process, equipment and chemicals.
We are in the final stages of optimizing the black silicon cells at our laboratory in Rochester, NY. We have asked the Solar Power Laboratory at Arizona State University to create wafers with varying junction depths so we can identify the most efficient etching depth for the black silicon. In my layman’s terms, the etching depth is, in essence, creating nano-sized mountains in a solar cell. As the sun crosses the sky at different angles, these tiny mountains capture and convert more energy. We are now making these wafers, with tiny mountains, into actual black silicon solar cells. The next step will be to use the most efficient combination of junction depth and etching depth to make our first black silicon solar panel.
Black silicon, and the next generation AR-Box™ Processing Station to create it, will mark our move into a commercial, revenue-producing company. We are very close to the optimization and demonstration phase of a black silicon solar panel. As a result of all of our exposure to the scientific community, we have received several serious offers from around the world to create joint venture relationships for manufacturing. We are cautious in negotiating many of these arrangements because we feel our leverage will be much greater with an optimized black silicon product. Both the product and the JV negotiations are imminent.
A few independent analysts have researched our technologies and reported on them. We have listed these analysts in the investor section of our website.
I hope you are as excited as we are about our black silicon breakthroughs. They have allowed us to take a shorter path to the factory and the production line…and the cash register.
Please feel free to call if you have any comments or questions.
Sincerely,