Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Intersolar: News From 5 Solar Startups

earth2tech is the go-to for the big Intersolar shindig. Here's the second of their reports that we're linking to:

The first annual North American solar conference kicked off on Tuesday with a lot of insight and discussion from some of the solar industry’s bigger and more well-established players (Applied Materials. SunPower). But leave it to the wily fast-moving startups to upstage the big guys when it comes to news. Here’s five startups — Wakonda, Fat Spaniel, Recurrent Energy, Sopogy, and Ausra — that announced some interesting news for the show.

Wakonda Raises $9.5M Series A: A Boston-based maker of solar photovoltaic technology, Wakonda Technologies, says it has raised $9.5 million in a Series A round from Advanced Technology Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, Applied Ventures (Applied Materials VC arm) and the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund. Wakonda explains its technology as a wafer surface treatment that enables low cost metal materials to mimic the high efficiency of more expensive semiconductor material. Wakonda says this tech is “a revolutionary method” that will reduce material costs for the solar industry....

I stopped here to link back to the Wakonda story from earlier this morning:
"Wakonda hopes to disrupt solar market with its high-efficiency thin-film PV on foil".
Here are the other four startups.