FORT COLLINS - With the promise of at least 500 manufacturing jobs next year, and the potential to change the global energy economy forever, a Colorado State University-bred solar power startup is about to burst into the commercial marketplace.

AVA Solar Inc. will build a plant at least 70,000 square feet in size that will turn ordinary sheet glass into solar power generators that likely will undercut the cost of coal, natural gas and any other conventional fuel for generating electricity.

The company's preferred location is a land parcel at the southwest quadrant of Interstate 25 and Prospect Road. A land swap for the parcel owned by Fort Collins is now under negotiation between the city and CSU.

AVA is in the home stretch of a successful trial of its manufacturing process, the critical component in its race against other solar energy competitors for a worldwide energy market.

"We've now tied up all the loose ends and, in my mind, this company is on its way," said Pascal Noronha, the company's CEO since joining the AVA founders earlier this year. "We are not just being euphoric. My technology background gives me confidence that, over time, we're going to be a much bigger company."

In the two years since the three founders of the company perfected the process of converting window glass into solar generators, they have fended off a purchase offer from industrial giant General Electric Co., in part to maintain control of their product and keep it close to home.



Land swap key

The linchpin of AVA's leap to commercialization is the land deal that makes the Prospect/I-25 intersection available to CSU for establishing a renewable energy research center with AVA as its principal anchor.

"This will be the largest new primary employer in Northern Colorado in the past two decades," said Hunt Lambert, CSU's associate vice president for economic development. "Getting one of these companies out of the labs and into production is a very, very tricky thing to do. But here they are."

The three research partners who founded AVA, W.S. Sampath, Kurt Barth and Al Enzenroth, this summer were granted a patent on the manufacturing equipment that could well launch the company to the forefront of the ultra-competitive solar power market.

A sparkling new production line, now operating at the company's leased space near the southeast corner of I-25 and Mulberry Street, will be replicated at least fivefold in the plant the company plans to open next year.

The core technology is thin-film deposition on glass, a process that is vastly cheaper than building photovoltaic generating cells from crystalline silicon, the material that is also the foundation of the semiconductor industry.

With a chemical compound called cadmium telluride as the prime ingredient, the manufacturing process builds an ultra-thin layer on the glass within an enclosed, automated chamber that moves the panels through a 22-step process.

What emerges are gray-green, 16-inch squares, each of which can produce as much electricity as two tons of coal burning at a power plant.

First Solar first out

An industry competitor with similar cadmium-based technology, Arizona-based First Solar Inc., is already producing solar generators at a plant in Germany - heavily subsidized by the German government - and plans to open another in Malaysia.

But Noronha predicts AVA's advantages - lower production costs and the ability to move quickly into large-scale manufacturing - will help level the field.

"We can deliver in the most cost-effective way, and we can scale," Noronha said. "You put those two facts together, and we have a big advantage. We'll grow fast, and that will start fairly quickly. I think it will be so fast that it would be foolish to predict in a meaningful way where we will be."

Noronha said AVA will produce its first products for about $1 per watt, about half the cost of electricity generated by coal-fired power plants. Wind-generated power, according to the American Wind Energy Association, has also dropped below the cost of coal, but remains about 80 cents per watt higher than Noronha's predicted market price for AVA-generated power.

Noronha, like Sampath a native of India, is the veteran of five technology startups, putting his Stanford MBA and his doctorate in materials engineering to work in each.

In the past six months, he has succeeded in raising $50 million for AVA, most of it from friends and family members.

The company has also received support from the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Northern Colorado Economic Development Corp. has helped the company obtain commitments for state-funded training grants, agency president Maury Dobbie said.



Creating the 'buzz'

"This is a wonderful project for our region," Dobbie said. "It helps provide the critical mass, and keeps this buzz going around Northern Colorado as being the hub of clean and renewable energy development."

Noronha said that AVA would commit to building its plants in the United States, rather than abroad where labor costs are lower and government subsidies hard to resist.

"We are an American company, and we will remain an American company," he said.

CSU, having granted AVA's founders sole rights to the company's patents, still stands to reap enormous benefits from the company's success, beginning with the research park on I-25.

"The university for years has wanted a presence on that corner, a project that would identify it as the gateway to Colorado State University," Lambert said. "This will do that in a major way. It is the beginning of the fulfillment of the clean-energy cluster's promise."

The city, in return for the highway frontage, will get 255 acres on the northeast corner of CSU's foothills campus that city officials have long wanted to add to the contiguous span of city-owned open space that protects the foothills from further development.