• San Jose Mercury News, Tuesday, December 18, 2007 12 PM

Nanosolar--a San Jose maker of thin-film solar cells whose backers include Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page and eBay founder Jeff Skoll--will announce today that it has shipped its first product.

The company, along with Beck Energy of Germany, won a competitive bidding process to create a solar farm on the site of a former landfill owned by a wastewater treatment plant in Luckenwalde, Germany. The facility will generate 1 megawatt of electricity, enough to power 750 California homes.

Nanosolar creates a copper-based semiconductor compound to print a thin film of ink on foil. It's much cheaper than conventional solar panels, says CEO Martin Roscheisen, and the company plans to make a profit selling solar panels for 99 cents per watt. With that as its premise, Nanosolar's factory will produce 430 megawatts of panels a year, enough to power more than 300,000 homes.

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