Ontario's Budding Solar Scene

Ontario, Canada used to be a major player in the telecom industry, but after it slowed down, technologists went looking for ways to transfer their expertise to new areas. Solar energy was a natural fit, and now Ontario is poised to become a major developer of solar photovoltaic technologies.

Companies like Cleanfield Energy and Flexible Solar Cell are showing the way, by developing technologies including new solar cells made from a dense turf of nanowires, and bendable, inexpensive solar panels.

Since solar cells are essentially just specialized chips, everything that has been learned in the semiconductor industry has applications in solar technology. The materials used to make semiconductors -- silicon as well as so-called Group III-V elements such as gallium -- indium, phosphorus and arsenic, can operate in reverse. Shine light on them and they can absorb the energy and turn it into electricity. In other words, semiconductors are solar cells that operate in reverse.

Supporting Ontario’s budding solar industry are academic institutions like McMaster University and the University of Toronto. At McMaster’s Centre for Electron Microscopy, scientists use a $14 million electron microscope called the Titan to look at particles that are smaller than viruses, molecules, DNA and even "nano" particles. Titan can zoom in on objects slightly less than one angstrom in size, or a million times thinner than a sheet of photocopy paper. The University of Toronto's Institute for Optical Sciences has a new spin-off called The Solar Venture, which aims to improve the economics of solar technologies.

To help fund the cutting-edge research, solar-cell manufacturer Arise Technologies and the Ontario Centres of Excellence awarded Rafael Kleiman, director of McMaster's Centre for Emerging Device Technologies, $4.1 million to help commercialize a new way of making more efficient solar cells.

Of course, Ontario isn’t alone in its pursuit of better, cheaper solar tech, and California's Silicon Valley – where semiconductors were invented – will also have a say in this new and potentially lucrative business. Companies such as SunPower, Miasole, Nanosolar and Optisolar are also aiming to create cheaper and more efficient solar cells.

If the competition for new solar technologies mimics the rise of the computing industry, it won't 't be long before we start seeing significant breakthroughs in both the cost and efficiency of solar cells. And some heated battles between the competitors along the way.