RSI Silicon, which stands for Reaction Sciences Incorporated, is a solar production company based out of Westborough Massachusetts (headquarters recently relocated to Northampton County, Pennsylvania) that has pioneered a way to cut costs and limit the amount of silicon that is used in creating solar panels and PV cells. While there are several ways to harness solar energy, photovoltaic cells are the industry standard for transforming solar radiation into electricity, but they have long been too expensive to compete with traditional electricity generated from coal.
Silicon has long been a bottleneck in the production of PV cells and RSISilicon has pioneered what it calls an “ultra-dissruptive” proccess for manufacturing solar panels. The company has announced that it can manufacture solar grade silicon that is less pure than is needed for semiconductors but is still adequate for solar panels. Furthermore, they can do it at 33% of the standard market production cost! This also means that they can build a new plant for one tenth of the cost that their competitors would be paying and that they can do it in half the time. What’s more interesting, while many silicon manufacturing plants split their products between the semiconductor industry and solar, RSI Silicon is dedicated solely to solar production which is what gives it a competitive advantage in this rapidly growing field.
Having recently won a “People’s Choice” award in an MIT business plan competition called “Ignite Clean Energy” which provided $200K in funding, RSI Solar is poised to take on a new model for solar panel distribution. Similar to a business model that a company called Citizenre initially proposed, RSI Silicon is in negotiation with an unnamed company that wants to buy 10,000 tons of silicon for their own production plant and then rent solar panels to the masses of home owners in the United States. This process will will speed the deployment of solar technology and reduce strain on the electrical grid. Below we have included an interview with James Dunn, V.P. Of Operations and Business Development for RSI Silicon which gives an overview of this initiative.
James Dunn, RSI Solar video interview
Unfortunately, as James mentions in the video interview, RSI Solar is sold out for the next five years. As homeowners continue to search for opportunities to contribute to clean tech solutions we will continue to track the news of solar renting opportunities. As RSI Silicon builds new plants in China and Europe in 2008 the hope is that within two years their product will help reach grid parity to traditional dirty electricity production methods which will be the key ingredient to move away from fossil fuels long term.
