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April 28, 2009: A former official with the US Environmental Protection Agency is calling for a new environmental and consumer protection agency to oversee nanotechnology.

Existing existing health and safety agencies are unable to cope with the risk assessment, standard setting and oversight challenges of advancing nanotechnology, according to J. Clarence (Terry) Davies. In a recently released paper, Oversight of Next Generation Nanotechnology, he calls for a new Department of Environmental and Consumer Protection to oversee product regulation, pollution control and monitoring and technology assessment.

“Federal regulatory agencies already suffer from under-funding and bureaucratic ossification, but they will require more than just increased budgets and minor rule changes to deal adequately with the potential adverse effects of new technologies,” according to Davies. “New thinking, new laws and new organizational forms are necessary. Many of these changes will take a decade or more to accomplish, but there is an urgent need given the rapid pace of technological change to start thinking about them now.”

In the report’s preface, first EPA administrator William D. Ruckelshaus points out that the proposed new agency “…would be more of a science agency than the current regulatory ones and would incorporate more integrated approaches to oversight and monitoring.”

The proposed agency would foster more integrated oversight and a unified mechanism for product regulation to deal with current problems like toxics in children’s toys and newer challenges like nanotechnology. A more integrated approach to pollution control was necessary even before EPA was created, and since that time the need has only increased, according to Davies.

Davies served during the George H.W. Bush administration as Assistant Administrator for Policy, Planning and Evaluation at the US Environmental Protection Agency. In 1970, as a consultant to the President’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization, he co-authored the plan that created EPA. As a senior staff member at the Council on Environmental Quality, he wrote the original version of what became the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

April 23, 2009 – European R&D consortium IMEC and chemicals/materials supplier Cytec Industries are collaborating to develop “a commercially viable” technology for organic photovoltaic devices that’s more stable and longer-life technology.

The project will take two approaches, addressing intrinsic and extrinsic problems. First: address stability issues in the nanomorphology of active materials. Work on chemical synthesis and materials processing will seek to halt the phase segregation to which a photoactive blend of conjugated polymers and fullerene acceptor molecules is susceptible. The second focus of the joint work will be to develop a new barrier/encapsulation technology to prevent the ingress of oxygen and water vapor.

The project, combining IMEC’s background in organic solar cell processing and analysis and Cytec’s know-how in interfacial engineering and coating technology, will run for two years (through March 2011), co-sponsored by the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders.

“We are convinced that Cytec’s capabilities in coatings, adhesives, inks and energy curing technology combined with IMEC’s outstanding processing and technology capabilities will make this project a success,” said Martin Court, VP of R&D for Cytec’s specialty chemicals unit, in a statement.

“Organic solar cell technology is one of the most exciting emerging technologies for low-cost photovoltaic cells,” added Jef Poortmans, IMEC’s program director for photovoltaics. “IMEC is very pleased to have the opportunity to combine its process technology expertise with the excellent skills of Cytec in the field of synthesis and coatings to address the crucial issue of device stability and encapsulation.”

April 22, 2009: Utah and Texas researchers have learned how quiet sounds are magnified by bundles of tiny, hair-like tubes atop “hair cells” in the ear: when the tubes dance back and forth, they act as “flexoelectric motors” that amplify sound mechanically.

“We are reporting discovery of a new nanoscale motor in the ear,” says Richard Rabbitt, the study’s principal author and a professor and chair of bioengineering at the University of Utah College of Engineering, in a statement. “The ear has a mechanical amplifier in it that uses electrical power to do mechanical amplification.”

“It’s like a car’s power steering system,” he adds. “You turn the wheel and mechanical power is added. Here, the incoming sound is like your hand turning the wheel, but to drive, you need to add power to it. These hair bundles add power to the sound. If you did not have this mechanism, you would need a powerful hearing aid.”

The new study is published in PLoS ONE, a journal published by the Public Library of Science. Co-authors include Katie Breneman, a bioengineering doctoral student at the University of Utah, and William Brownell, a professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine) at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

The researchers speculate flexoelectrical conversion of electricity into mechanical work also might be involved in processes such as memory formation and food digestion.

Dancing cells and hair-like tubes in your ears

Previous research elsewhere indicated that hair cells within the cochlea of the inner ear can “dance” — elongate and contract — to help amplify sounds.

The new study shows sounds also may be amplified by the back-and-forth flexing or “dancing” of “stereocilia,” the 50-300 hair-like nanotubes projecting from the top of each hair cell.

Such flexing converts an electric signal generated by incoming sound into mechanical work — namely, more flexing of the stereocilia — thereby amplifying the sound by what is known as a flexoelectric effect.

“Dancing hairs help you hear,” says Breneman. The study “suggests sensory cells in the ear are compelled to move when they hear sounds, just like a music aficionado might dance at a concert. In this case, however, they’ll dance in response to sounds as miniscule as the sound of your own blood flow pulsating in your ear.”

In a yet-unpublished upcoming study, Rabbitt, Breneman and Brownell find evidence the hair cells themselves — like the stereocilia bundles atop those cells — also amplify sound by getting longer and shorter due to flexoelectricity.

Rabbitt and Brownell estimate the combined flexoelectric amplification — by both hair cells and the hair-like stereocilia atop hair cells — makes it possible for humans to hear the quietest 35 to 40 decibels of their range of hearing. Rabbitt says the flexoelectric amplifiers are needed to hear sounds quieter than the level of comfortable conversation.

“The beauty of the amplifier is that it allows you to hear very quiet sounds,” Brownell says. Rabbit says that because hair cells die as people age, older people often “need a hearing aid because amplification by the hair cells is not working.”

Because hair-like stereocilia also are involved in our sense of balance, the flexing of stereocilia not only contributes to hearing, but “also likely is involved in our sense of gravity, motion and orientation — all the things needed to have balance,” Rabbitt says.

The new study is part of an effort by researchers to understand the amazing sensitivity of human hearing. Rabbitt says the hair cells are so sensitive they can detect sounds almost as small as those caused by Brownian motion, which is the irregular movement of particles suspended in gas or liquid and bombarded by molecules or atoms.

An amplifier for all sorts of ears

Hair cells are inside the inner ears of many animals. They are within the ear’s cochlea, which is the spiral, snail-shell-shaped cavity where incoming sound vibrations are converted into nerve impulses and sent to the brain. Incoming sounds must be amplified because incoming sound waves are “damped” by fluid that fills the inner ear. Hair cells are about 10μm wide, and 30-100μm long. By comparison, a human hair is roughly 100μm wide. The hair-like stereocilia tubes poking out the top of a hair cell are each a mere 1-10μm long and about 200nm wide.


Cross-section of part of the cochlea, the fluid-filled part of the inner ear that converts vibrations from incoming sounds into nerve signals that travel to the brain via the auditory nerve. University of Utah and Baylor College of Medicine researchers found evidence that stereocilia — bundles of tiny hair-like tubes atop “hair cells” in the cochlea — dance back and forth to mechanically amplify incoming sounds via what is known as the “flexoelectric effect.” (Credit: William Brownell, Baylor College of Medicine)

Brownell says the new study shows how the flexoelectric effect “can account for the amplification of sound in the cochlea.”

Stereocilia essentially are membranes that have been rolled into tiny tubes, so “the fact that a membrane can generate acoustic [mechanical] energy is novel,” says Brownell. “Imagine hearing a soap bubble talk.”

Flexoelectricity in a membrane was noted a few decades ago when a researcher in Europe showed that flexing or bending a simple membrane in a laboratory generated an electrical field. Then, in 1983, Brownell showed that a hair cell from a guinea pig’s ear changed in length when an electric field was applied to it in a lab dish.

The length of stereocilia changes along the coiled length of the cochlea. Different lengths are sensitive to different frequencies of sound. And different animals have different ranges of stereocilia lengths.

Breneman and colleagues devised math formulas and used computer simulations to arrive at the new study’s key finding: The flexoelectric amplifier can explain why varying lengths of stereocilia predict which sound frequencies are heard most easily by a variety of animals, from humans to bats, mice, turtles, chickens and lizards.

“They found that a longer stereocilium was more efficient if it was receiving low-frequency sounds,” while shorter stereocilia most efficiently amplified high-frequency sound, Brownell says.

Breneman says scientists now know of five ways the ears amplify sound, and “what makes this one unique is that it would be present in the stereocilia bundles of all hair cells, not only outer hair cells.”

The cochleae of humans and other mammals have “inner hair cells” that sense sound passively and active “outer hair cells” that amplify sounds. Other higher animals have hair cells, without a distinction between inner and outer.

Because the new study shows the dancing hair-like stereocilia act like an amplifier on any hair cell, “it explains how this amplifier may work in all higher animals like birds and reptiles, not just humans,” Rabbitt says.

How the amplifier works in the inner ear — and perhaps elsewhere

When sound enters the cochlea and reaches the hair cells, sound pressure makes the hair-like stereocilia tubes “pivot left or right similar to the way a signpost bends in heavy wind,” Breneman says.

The tops of the tubes are connected to each other by protein filaments. Where each filament comes in contact with the top end of a stereocilium tube, there is an “ion channel” that opens and closes as the bundle of stereocilia sway back and forth.

When the channel opens, electrically charged calcium and potassium ions flow into the tubes. That changes the electric voltage across the membrane encasing each stereocilium, making the tubes flex and dance even more.

Such flexoelectricity amplifies the sound and ultimately releases neurotransmitter chemicals from the bottom of the hair cells, sending the sound’s nerve signal to the brain, Breneman says.

“We’ve got these nanotubes — stereocilia — moving left and right and converting electrical power [from ions] into mechanical amplification of sound-induced vibrations in the ear,” Rabbitt says. He says the “flexoelectric motor” is the collective movement of the stereocilia in response to sound.

Brownell says the new study — showing that sound is amplified by “dancing” membrane tubes atop hair cells — adds to growing evidence that membranes do not “just sit there,” but instead are “dynamic structures capable of doing work using a mechanism called flexoelectricity.”

Brownell and Rabbitt note that stereocilia involved in amplifying hearing have similarities with other tube-like structures in the human body, such as villi in the gut, dendritic spines on the signal-receiving ends of nerve cells, and growth cones on the signal-transmitting axon ends of growing nerve cells.

So they speculate flexoelectricity may play a role in how villi in the intestines help absorb food and how nerves grow and repair themselves.

“There is some evidence that dendrites and axons change their diameter during intracellular voltage changes, and that could well have flexoelectric origins,” says Rabbitt. “Any time you have a membrane with small diameter — like in axons, dendrites and synaptic vesicles [located between nerve cells], there will be large flexoelectric forces and effects. Therefore, the flexoelectric effect may be at work in things like learning and memory. But that’s pretty speculative.”

April 21, 2009: At this week’s Design, Automation & Test in Europe conference, IMEC is presenting a new design strategy for brain implants, which it used to create a prototype multi-electrode stimulation and recording probe for deep-brain stimulation.

With this development, IMEC highlights the opportunities in the healthcare market for design tool developers. Brain implants for electrical stimulation of specific brain areas are used as a last-resort therapy for brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, tremor, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Today’s deep-brain stimulation probes use millimeter-size electrodes. These stimulate, in a highly unfocused way, a large area of the brain and have significant
unwanted side effects.

“To have a more precise stimulation and recording, we need electrodes that are as small as individual brain cells (neurons),” said Wolfgang Eberle, senior scientist and project manager at IMEC’s bioelectronics research group. “Such small electrodes can be made with semiconductor process technology, appropriate design tools, and advanced electronic signal processing. At DATE, we want to bring this message to the design community, showing the huge opportunities that the healthcare sector offers.”

IMEC’s design and modeling strategy allows developing advanced brain implants consisting of multiple electrodes enabling simultaneous stimulation and recording. This strategy was used to create prototype probes with 10μm-size electrodes and various electrode topologies.

The design strategy relies on finite-element modeling of the electrical field distribution around the brain probe. This was done with the multi-physics simulation software COMSOL 3.4 and 3.5. The COMSOL tools also enabled investigating the mechanical properties of the probe during surgical insertion and the effects of temperature. The results indicate that adapting the penetration depth and field asymmetry allow steering the electrical field around the probe. This results in high-precision stimulation. Also key to the design approach is developing a mixed-signal compensation scheme enabling multi-electrode probes capable of stimulation as well as recording. This is needed to realize closed-loop systems.

These new design approaches open up possibilities for more effective stimulation with less side effects, reduced energy consumption due to focusing the stimulation current on the desired brain target, and closed-loop control adapting the stimulation based on the recorded effect.


A prototype multi-electrode stimulation and recording probe for deep-brain stimulation. (Photo courtesy of IMEC)

April 21, 2009 – While the PV industry, along with many others, is handwringing over the current severe downturn, it may in fact be just what is needed — thinning the herd and rebalancing production and capacity to demand, according to a new report from iSuppli.

2009 looks to be ugly for photovoltaics, by iSuppli’s calculations: Worldwide installations of photovoltaic systems are expected to decline 32% to 3.5GW, sales down ~40% to $18.2B, and average price/solar watt down 12% (see figures). That’s after several years of enjoying ~40% annual growth, which had drawn a “flood of market participants” with a “wild-west mentality” of throwing production capacity into the market, according to Henning Wicht, senior director and principal analyst for iSuppli, in a statement.

But in 2009 that bill comes due, in the form of overproduction combined with a decline in demand — Wicht likened the environment to the “PC shakeout of the mid-1980s.” A big culprit is Spain, which accounted for half of worldwide PV installations in 2008, but is set to expire a feed-in tariff and institute a looming new cap of 500MW for PV projects. A surge in excess inventory and falling solar cell/systems prices won’t spur enough demand to make up for lost sales, Wicht says. “Even new and upgraded incentives for solar installations from nations including the United States and Japan — and attractive investment conditions in France, Italy, the Czech Republic, Greece and other countries — cannot compensate for the Spanish whiplash in 2009,” he writes.


Global annual PV installations, 2008-2013. (Source: iSuppli Corp.)

Another obvious scapegoat is the current macroeconomic climate. “Power production investors and commercial entities are at least partially dependent upon debt financing,” he notes. Right now, many larger solar installation projects are going on hold, awaiting a thaw in bank crediting.

But beyond this year, the future looks bright for the global PV market. Fewer new suppliers will pop up, capacity additions will slow, and the PV market will take a big step toward maturity as supply and demand return to balance. Wicht projects a ~58% increase in revenues in 2011, “and similar growth rates in 2012 and 2013.” Government incentives such as above-market feed-in-tariffs and tax breaks will continue to spur demand, and as costs come down ROI for PV systems will become clearer, even without government subsidies. Lower system prices will have the biggest impact in developing regions, he noted.


Global revenues generated by PV installations, 2008-2013. (Source: iSuppli Corp.)

April 20, 2009: The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) will use money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to fund research on whether engineered nanomaterials pose risks to human health, and on ways nanotechnology can be used to clean up superfund sites.

The NIEHS will also use the funds to provide safety training for workers in industries working with nanotechnology, as well as workers in the fields of weatherization, alternative energy development, and “green” construction.

More than $29 million will be available through NIEHS over the next two years with the goal of helping to support the responsible and safe development of these emerging technologies.

Deadlines for applying for the various types of grants offered through NIEHS begin as early as April 27. The proposed projects should be able to show tangible results within two years.

by Michael A. Fury, Techcet Group

April 20, 2009 – Blogging exclusively for SST, Techcet’s Michael A. Fury sums up papers on the MRS Spring meeting’s final day, with discussion of thin films for magnetic sensors, advances in phase-change memory, and progress in the combinatorial searches for a higher-k dielectric than HfO2 and carbon-doped TaN metal gate compositions for HK.

Ichiro Takeuchi of the U. of Maryland is developing electromechanically coupled bilayer devices of magnetostrictive and piezoelectric thin films for magnetic sensor applications. Freestanding cantilevers of PZT and FeGe films (50μm wide and 500nm thick) have demonstrated sensitivities to nano-tesla levels; with optimization, sensitivity in the pico-tesla range is anticipated. Under the influence of an applied electric field, ferroelastic domain movement in the PZT lattice has been shown to be reversible and stable after removing the field. This mode of operation is the functional opposite of the magnetic field sensor mode, and presents an opportunity for developing this phenomenon as another option for non-volatile memory.

Greg Atwood of Numonyx gave a sweeping overview of recent advances in phase-change memory. These devices are based on a reversible amorphous-to-crystalline phase transition of a chalcogenide circuit element that results in a large resistance change. A common choice is Ge2Sb2Te5, which can become amorphous in 1nsec and recrystallize in 10nsec. Materials of this class are used currently for optical read/write disks; devices storing up to 128Mb have been fabricated and tested. The phase transition of each cell element is driven by two thermal resistance heaters which rapidly drive the material to over 700°C locally. The intended function is programmable ROM and power-down storage, and not laptop RAM.

Martin Green from NIST presented his combinatorial search for ternary high-k dielectrics similar to today’s favorite HfO2, but with a higher k value in the range of 30-50. TiO2 would be a good choice except for the fact that, in contact with silicon, it forms an undesirable silicide. Choosing a Hf-Ti-Y system, Green was able to map dielectric constant and leakage current as a function of composition, and confirmed the presence of a range that exhibited the target high-k and low leakage values. Further characterization work will include a MEMS-based nano-calorimeter that will map thermal stability vs. composition to detect undesirable phase transitions.

In a related study, Kao-Shuo Chang from the same group at NIST used combinatorial methods to screen for carbon-doped TaN metal gate compositions that could meet the target work function for use in direct contact with a high-k gate dielectric, in this case HfO2. In this technique, 50nm metal gate composition libraries were fabricated atop 3nm HfO2 films which were deposited on p+ substrates having SiO2 thicknesses ranging from 4-10nm. Varying the SiO2 thickness while keeping all other dimensions constant enables extraction of the metal gate work function from the electrical data. The technique was shown to have worked, but the group is not yet prepared to make recommendations for high-k and metal gate (HK+MG) compositions.

Abstracts for all of the papers presented over the five days of this symposium can be found online.

Michael A. Fury, Ph.D, is senior technology analyst at Techcet Group, LLC, P.O. Box 29, Del Mar, CA 92014; email [email protected].

by Paula Mints, Navigant Consulting

April 17, 2009 – As the cliché goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. So it is with global solar technology (cells and modules) revenues. During the 12-year period from 1996 through 2008, revenues increased by a compound annual growth rate of 40% from $367 million to $20.4 billion (see Figure 1). Even though the market for solar products was significantly oversold, though, technology revenues increased by 80% in 2008; megawatt sales totaled 5.5GW. Those strong revenues and sales will be remembered fondly at the end of 2009, as demand softens and technology prices continue falling.


Figure 1: Solar industry technology revenues 1996-2008, US $M. Does not including system revenues, or revenues from integrating cells into calculators and watches. (Source: Navigant Consulting)

If 2008 was a party for the industry, 2009 is the morning after. Currently the PV industry is coping with high levels of inventory left over from overselling the 2008 market while a global recession along with a banking, credit, and housing crisis has softened demand for PV systems. Figure 2 offers three forecasts ranging from a recession forecast with negative (-4%) growth to an accelerated forecast with 20% growth. Even these conservative forecasts are viewed by the usually upbeat PV industry as too optimistic.


Figure 2: Solar industry five-year demand forecast, 2003-2013. (Source: Navigant Consulting)

High inventory levels and soft demand are driving prices in 2009. The average module selling price in 2008 was $3.69/Wp, though this average hides a significant range, from <$2.50/Wp for some thin-films to >$5.00/Wp for smaller modules and buyers with little market power. In 2009, average module prices are $2.90/Wp, about 21% off the 2008 average. Again, there are still some higher price modules on the market but they are not moving robustly, and there are modules selling at a significantly lower price/watt.

Given the above forecast and the current average module price, PV industry revenues are likely to fall in 2009, something the industry has not experienced since the bad old profitless days. Given current market conditions — low price and soft demand — the following revenue expectations are not unreasonable to assume:

  • Recession forecast: -25% for $15,220-million
  • Conservative forecast: -14% for $17,487-million
  • Accelerated forecast: -6% for 19,137-million

With current market conditions, the estimate of $19B in 2009 revenues under the accelerated scenario would probably come as a relief.

The industry and its observers should take heart; all forecasts eventually lead north to continued strong demand and sales. Realism, though, requires that the industry expect a least a year, and perhaps two years, of lower prices, sales, and profitability. Simply, the PV industry is entering a short-term period of being demand limited. As for any industry from toothpaste to luxury cars, this period will bring lower prices (perhaps aggressively so) and tighter margins. It will also, out of necessity, accelerate the learning curve to the manufacturing efficiencies that bring lower costs and thus more cushion in profit margins.

Historically, the PV industry has proven more than willing to price aggressively, to near and in some cases below cost. (see Figure 3). While over time the trend is to lower prices, there are also periods of price increases, most notably during the 2004-2008 boom.


Figure 3: Average module selling prices, 1983-2008. (Source: Navigant Consulting)

The PV industry is still maturing, and after a short period will continue experiencing strong growth. Likely, there will be future periods of high pricing, years in which the market will be oversold, and new business models to complement what has always been excellent technology development. The current situation of soft demand after several years of >50% growth in annual sales has to feel like déjà vu to industry participants that lived through the profitless years. But just like the morning after hangover, this too shall pass.

Paula Mints is principal analyst, PV Services Program, and associate director in the energy practice at Navigant Consulting. E-mail: [email protected].

This article was originally published by Photovoltaics World.

by Lou Schwartz, China Strategies LLC

April 16, 2009 – As Jin Baofang, the Chairman of the Board of the Jinglong Group, a Chinese solar energy company and a delegate to the National People’s Congress, recently said of the relationship between the Chinese economy and the economies of large consuming nations: “when nations that are large consumers sneeze, our manufacturers immediately catch a cold.”

The worldwide financial crisis has laid bare the unhealthy symbiotic relationship between the Chinese and Western economies. The unsustainable economic model that had Western countries (most notably the U.S.) buying cheap, labor-intensive exports from China with funds borrowed from the Chinese has collapsed. Consequently the West (and particularly the U.S.) will have to reorient its economies to produce and save more and consume less while China will have to restructure its economy so that it relies less on exports and increases domestic consumption to maintain its impressive GDP growth.

The Chinese solar power industry is a case in point, reflecting (no pun intended) China’s unhealthy dependence on exports and the prospects for renewed growth as the Chinese government adjusts its model for economic growth.

In the words of Shi Dinghuan, an advisor to the State Council and Chairman of the Board of the China Renewable Energy Society, the new energy industry in China that has suffered the most from the worldwide financial crisis is China’s solar industry. Through the end of 2008, China had become the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic cells, but because approximately 98% of sales of PV products were exports, when financing became tight worldwide, orders for PV products from China were widely cancelled, particularly from the three largest consumers of Chinese solar power products: Spain, Germany and Japan.

The contraction and/or cancellation of orders from the West has been widely deleterious to China’s solar power industry. For example, before the financial crisis of late 2008, in previous years, Wuxi’s Suntech had operated at 60% capacity utilization during the winter months; since the worldwide financial crisis, Suntech has operated at capacity utilization rates one-half normal levels. The sudden drop-off in manufacturing activity in turn has forced Suntech to lay off approximately 10% of its existing workforce and not follow through on its plans to increase the company’s workforce by an additional 20% or so.

Smaller PV manufacturers with fewer resources than Suntech, have been forced out of business. One need only look at the current stock prices of publicly traded Chinese solar companies and compare them to what those stocks were selling for a year or more ago, to appreciate the body blow that the Chinese solar power industry has taken of late due to its excessive dependence on foreign trade. Suntech’s 52-week high was in excess of $50/share; as of March 27, 2009, a share of Suntech sold for less than $11/share.

Jin Baofang rightly points out that the root of the imbalance in the market for Chinese PV products that has come back to haunt Chinese solar manufacturers is the excessively low targets for development of China’s domestic solar industry: the {Mid to Long Term Plan for Renewable Energy} sets the objective of China having a cumulative total of only 300 megawatts (MW) of installed PV power by 2010, increasing to just 1800 MW by 2020. These objectives for domestic growth of installed solar power in China are seriously out of balance with the output capacity of China’s PV manufacturing industry.

Shi Dinghuan has stated that what China’s solar power manufacturing industry needs is a more active set of government policies to support and subsidize the adoption of solar power domestically, along the lines of the industrial policies that have created significant growth in the Chinese wind industry (see recent article). Because the use of solar power in China has been insignificant, the potential for growth is outstanding.

Very recently the framework of such policies intended to jumpstart domestic solar power demand and turn around China’s overly export-oriented PV industry has begun to emerge. In late March, the Chinese Ministry of Finance promulgated its {Interim Measures for the Administration of Government Subsidies of Building Uses of Solar Energy Photovoltaic Power} (called “Interim Measures”) and the accompanying {Implementing Opinion Concerning Speeding Up the Promotion of the Use of Solar Energy PV Power in Buildings} (called “Solar-Powered Buildings Promotion Opinion”), which together provide a framework for the implementation of China’s “Solar-Powered Rooftops Plan.”

Initially the Solar-Powered Rooftops Plan will be a demonstration project in selected towns and counties, a formula that has been successfully used by Chinese policy-makers over the years with respect to countless initiatives. The Solar-Powered Rooftops Plan seeks to develop demonstration projects for building integrated solar power (including solar power rooftop units and PV curtain walls) in large and mid-sized cities that are relatively well developed economically. The plan also supports the development of PV systems in villages and remote areas that are outside the reach of the power grid.

The central feature of the Interim Measures is a financial stimulus for the Chinese solar power industry: the Ministry of Finance has earmarked a special fund to provide subsidies for PV systems that are at least 50 kilowatts (kW) in size and have 16% efficiency for mono-crystalline PV products, 14% efficiency for multi-crystalline PV products and 6% efficiency for thin-film applications; for 2009 the subsidy is now set at up to 20 Yuan/watt [US $2.93/watt]. It is estimated that the new subsidy will cover the approximate cost of the equipment or perhaps one-half to 60% of the total cost of an installed system.

With the exception of the solar power systems subsidies set out in the Interim Measures, the plan is, for the most part, merely suggestive of what needs to be done to develop a thriving solar industry in China. Though the Chinese usually do a good job in filling in the interstices of plans as time goes on, at present this plan appears improvised to address the dire condition of the Chinese PV industry.

In this sector as in countless others, the Chinese have much work ahead to reorient their industries from an excessively large reliance on foreign trade to one that is more balanced, but in order to accomplish that objective, the Chinese must create and deploy a domestic technology development, legal, marketing, administrative and human infrastructure to match the manufacturing and export prowess of the Chinese solar industry. The Interim Measures are one important, though tentative, step in that direction.

This article was originally published by RenewableEnergyWorld.com.

April 15, 2009: RUSNANO, a Russian state-owned nanotech business group, wants to pump millions of dollars into Canadian nanotechnology companies, according to a report by Canwest News Service.

Representatives of RUSNANO traveled to Canada last week and, according to one official, liked what they saw so much that they said they would invest a minimum of $10 million in any single firm by the end of the year.

The investments, if they happen, could inject some life into Canada’s nanotech industry, which has suffered from lack of government investment and incentives. Neil Gordon, former head of the now-defunct Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance, has told Small Times that the “Canadian government had ignored the massive economic development opportunity from nanotechnology.”