It is not yet the Holy Grail of economic development, but perhaps it’s a start. This week, after a year of hard work, The Solar Energy Consortium (TSEC) announced its first contract with a company that will manufacture solar power products, hopefully from a facility customized for its needs at TechCity in the Town of Ulster. Under current plans, Prism Solar Technologies Inc. is promising to bring at least 400 manufacturing jobs to the area over the next five years, possibly creating the prospect for many more. Call it the handle of the Holy Grail, a start toward constructing the entire vessel and filling it with economic sustenance.
As exciting as the prospect of a locally based major player in world-busting solar technology seems, TSEC has in its early incarnation been a hard thing to wrap one’s head around. So far it’s been a skeletal framework of promises with a strong, able facilitator in its CEO, former vice president of IBM eServer development operations Vincent Cozzolino. With some help, Cozzolino has assembled a sprawling cast of New York state-based research universities, talented local role players, a bit of government largesse and oodles of goodwill. The missing piece has been a real, bricks-and-mortar manufacturing component on which to hang some of TSEC’s ambitious dreams, and which might actually end up providing some badly needed jobs in the local economy.
That changed on Monday morning, Feb. 25 when, against an appropriately sun-drenched backdrop in the contrastingly dark lobby of the Marriott Courtyard Inn that crowns a rocky bluff overlooking TechCity, U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-Hurley) gathered a respectable crowd of businesspeople, politicians, economic development professionals and journalists to welcome Prism Solar and its visionary CEO, Rick Lewandowski, as the first manufacturing concern to sign a deal with TSEC.
To sustained applause, Lewandowski and Cozzolino inked the contract under Hinchey’s proud paternal eye as photographers struggled to get a photo through the brightly backlit gloom. Then all three spoke in broad but glowing terms of what Prism does and what its involvement will mean in to the local economy. “If we can develop this industry in the appropriate way, we could be the center of attention around the world for new solar technologies,” said Hinchey.
“The market is certainly there,” said Lewandowski. “Everyone understands we have to get away from fossil fuels, we have to get to alternative energy sources, we have to get to renewable fuels, or we are not going to make it as a species.
“The (solar energy) market itself is exploding right now,” Lewandowski said, citing statistics showing growth rates of over 40 percent per year for the last five years, with 37 percent growth over ten years. The worldwide market for photovoltaic modules was approximately $8.3 billion in 2006, and is still in its infancy. Lewandowski said that demand is so great that: “We could have growth at 400 percent per year” for the foreseeable future and “we still would not catch up with that demand.”
Cozzolino was at least as bullish, if not more so. “We feel this is the beginning of the next industrial revolution, here in the Hudson Valley, the energy revolution,” he said.
Competition notwithstanding, Cozzolino believes the Hudson Valley has a leg up in the solar sweepstakes. He stressed that New York State – and especially New York City – is seen as “a sleeping giant” in terms of the economic potential of solar energy, a fact that theoretically provides the Hudson Valley region with a strong strategic advantage due to its proximity to the slumbering beast.
Solar Prism expects to start shipping finished products within a year. Lewandowski estimates that it will bring more than 140 jobs within three years into the community, and upwards of 400 jobs within five years. He said the company needs help ranging from secretaries to experts in high-tech optics and engineering. He said that, despite competition from other places as a landing place for the company, he chose New York and the Hudson Valley particularly because of the highly skilled labor force, many of whom are left over from days when IBM had major manufacturing capability in the same TechCity facilities his company hopes to occupy.
Lewandowski said that Prism has raised about $8.5 million, primarily from venture capital firms, and implied that such investment was a relatively easy sell these days, when the solar business is in a growth spurt.
Currently in its embryonic stages at the Hudson Valley Center for Innovation, the company “hopes” to set up shop in TechCity, Lewandowksi said, and is currently researching which of the many available buildings on the site would best suit its needs. While nothing has been finalized, Lewandowski said the company is “looking only at buildings in TechCity currently, and we think there are probably enough of them we should be able to find the right one.”
Impressive solar credentials
Lewandowski is a known entity, and is regarded as a player in the burgeoning solar energy field. A Stone Ridge resident, he has deep roots in Ulster County, having been corporate VP of technology at Besicorp Group, Inc. before spinning himself off to found SunWize Technologies, Inc., which has become one of the largest PV distributors in North America, and which he sold to Besicorp 12 years ago.
In 1996, thanks to an investment from a Niagara Mohawk Energy subsidiary, he teamed up with Bill Jacoby to found Niskayuna-based Direct Global Power, Inc., a renewable energy firm that is the corporate parent of Prism Solar, with a 25 percent stake.
Formed in 2005 as Jacoby took the helm of Direct Global Power so that Lewandowski could devote his energies to the new concern, Prism Solar’s primary business focus is to manufacture and sell its patented “holographic planar concentrator” (HPC) films to the many makers of photovoltaic modules, including biggies like Hitachi, REC, Evergreen Solar, BP Solar, SunPower, CentroSolar and Conergy.
A better angle on the biz
Prism’s HPC film technology can spectrally select the desired wavelengths of sunlight and concentrate them onto a solar cell. The process allows for a significant reduction in the amount of silicon solar cells that are required in a photovoltaic module, resulting in sharply lower cost and allowing for a business advantage at a time when there is a shortage in the raw material, silicon. Prism’s patented technology reduces the amount of silicon required in passive solar cells by 85 percent, without reducing power output.
And by using an actual prism (hence the company name) to direct select wavelengths of solar energy onto power cells, the technology allows improved energy production in morning and evening hours when the sun is not at optimum angles for traditional solar panels.
While rule-of-thumb estimates say that the typical solar cell transforms about 16 to 18 percent of the energy that falls on it into usable power, Prism’s technology “allows us to capture lower angle sunlight, passively track the sun without moving the module, and create 5 to 10 percent more” of an energy return from each cell, said Lewandowski. He added that as development efforts continue, that amount will improve even more over current norms, while the price should decline. He said he believes that within a matter of decades, Americans will have the ability to routinely power their homes with solar cells for about the same cost, or less, as they currently pay for traditional electricity sources.
State your pleasure
With his seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, Hinchey has found ways to aim some $4 million in appropriations from the House of Representatives ticketed for various aspects of TSEC operations, including some $1 million now being earmarked specifically for Prism Solar. Lewandowski said the money will largely be used for purchasing equipment and training employees.
The State of New York has thus far made no substantial commitment to the endeavor, which has puzzled some local observers who questioned why Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer seemed so uninterested in the pet project of a senior Democratic congressman. But state money may soon be forthcoming. Hinchey said Spitzer has earmarked some $5 million in his proposed budget for the TSEC initiative, money that Hinchey said he hopes will be approved by the state legislature when it weighs in on the final state budget. There is no certainty, however, as the state faces a budget deficit of roughly $5 billion and a looming recession of the national economy is weighing heavily on the minds of state lawmakers.
Lewandowski said that investing in Solar Prism and other alternative energy endeavors would be a wise investment for the state. He said studies have shown that investment in renewable energy sources yields eight jobs for every job a similar investment in fossil fuel power creates, and said the figure is even more lopsided for renewable sources versus nuclear power.
He cited the situation in the 1990s, in what was formerly known as East Germany, shortly after the Berlin Wall came down and a reunified Germany re-emerged. The former Soviet client state found itself economically distressed and saw renewable energy, particularly solar power, as a way to jumpstart an economic renaissance. The result, within a decade, was 20,000 manufacturing jobs and 18 new renewable energy companies, with Germany emerging as a global leader in solar power manufacturing and use. “That’s a very significant case study that I think can be duplicated and even exceeded here in the Hudson Valley,” said Lewandowski.
He said that economic growth from solar power is “not a bubble” such as was seen in the Internet boom of the last decade. “There are fundamentals here that aren’t going to change. We need energy.”