How Austin Has Become America's Clean-Tech Hub

The solar panels sparkle on the rooftop of HelioVolt's 12,000 sq m manufacturing facility. Inside, an elaborate line of printing machines, lasers, chemical baths and ovens — with help from the occasional white-coated human being — transforms a sheet of glass less than a centimeter thick into a solar module in just over two and a half hours. The sheets are a far cry from the thick, polysilicon-based photovoltaic panels that still dominate the solar market. HelioVolt manufactures thin-film solar panels, so called because the modules are made by depositing an ultra-thin — a few micrometers at most — layer of the photovoltaic chemicals copper, indium, gallium and selenide directly onto a glass backing. Compared with conventional modules, the engineering and manufacturing processes are more complex, and thin-film panels are less efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. But their lower cost has many in the solar world — like HelioVolt CEO Jim Flanary — convinced that thin-film panels are the way to go as the industry matures. "If you can do this really cheaply and really quickly, you've got a winner," says Flanary as he leads a walkthrough of HelioVolt's pilot plant. "We want to scale up as soon as we can."

It's not just the how of HelioVolt that makes it unusual in the solar space; it's also the where. The company isn't based in southern San Francisco or Boulder, Colo., or the Boston area — the bright green regions that tend to lead the national conversation on clean tech. HelioVolt calls the Texas state capital of Austin home. B.J. Stanbery, the solar veteran who founded HelioVolt in 2001, is a native Texan who got his bachelor's degree at the University of Texas just down the road from the company's factory, but he kept his business in Austin for more practical reasons. "The manufacturing skills that workers have here are directly transferable to a thin-film solar company like us," he says. "And the business culture is attractive here because people are used to taking risks in the energy space."

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Red State, Green City: How Austin Has Become America's Clean-Tech Hub - TIME