TJ Rodgers is chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor, which is the primary shareholder of the fast-growing silicon panel company, SunPower.
SunPower has excelled in the market by focusing on making silicon more efficient — even if silicon looks feeble compared to promise other, newer materials. CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide), for example, is cheaper and more flexible, scientists say — it can be sprayed like paint onto just about any surface.
But Rodgers, an outspoken Ayn Rand adherent, says silicon has been studied so much in recent decades, and is therefore so reliable, that his company will wipe out newcomers like Nanosolar, which is unveiling a product based on CIGS.
“Silicon has a reliability record which is unmatched by any other material,” he told CNET. “They could rename the company NanoDollar, because that’s all they are going to be left with after we get done kicking their butt,” Rodgers said referring to Nanosolar.
This is a counterpoint to the comments of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, about how science trumps everything — when it comes to multiplying resources. Translation of science into actual business application is unpredictable, and can take a long time for superior science to take over a market.
We’ll see if this is true for Nanosolar, which is due out on the market soon.
7 Comments
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Jeff Kempton said:
TJ Rogers must be really nervous about Nanosolar. It doesn’t happen often that a public-company CEO gets so emotional and defensive about a pre-launch startup!
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Anna said:
Here’s what Vinod Khosla wrote: “I love science because it’s a huge multiplier of resources. It has the potential to do something not 10 percent better or 20 percent better but 100 times better, and that power is what’s so exciting to me.”
So while SunPower is on the 10 percent improvement process-tuning schedule, Nanosolar is going for leveraging science to deliver the 100 times improvement factor.
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Edward Miller said:
I believe the url is actually http://sunpowercorp.com/
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Matt Marshall said:
Thanks, URL is fixed.
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Steve B. said:
This is just classic TJ. Anyone who is at all familiar with him knows that he is a visionary with the gift for prose laced with modern day slang. I would not put it past Sunpower to drive Nanosolar into a small niche in the PV market but until the polysilicon supply issue is mitigated there will always be room for alternative PV technologies.
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Alison Chaiken said:
Has Nanosolar even announced yet where there much anticipated fab is going to be? The previous SiliconBeat article said that the fab’s location would be announced in “two to six weeks” and that was in June. By contrast, Sunpower’s factory in the Philippines is open and producing devices. Nanosolar’s technology sounds exciting but we won’t really know until we see their products.
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Steve Sadlov said:
Once TJ Cypressizes and commoditizes photovoltaics, all the pretenders will indeed be taking an operational dirt nap. There is lots of BS in the “alternative energy” arena just now, fueled mostly by people stuck in the 1960s, entertaining Callenbachian utopian dreams. Meanwhile, a kick butt right wing business icon is doing it the brass tacks way and is ready to smoke the competition …. nothing but tail lights disappearing into the distance.
