World's largest solar plant planned in Bay Area

The Mercury News has the details. Sweet, renewable energy startups are starting to emerge and go public. I hope they choose SF:

A Palo Alto company has decided to build the world's largest factory for making solar power cells in the Bay Area -- a move that would nearly triple the nation's solar manufacturing capacity and give a significant boost to a growing source of clean energy.

Nanosolar, a privately held company founded in 2001 with seed money from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is scheduled to make the announcement Wednesday, and in the next two to six weeks will select either San Jose, Santa Clara or San Francisco for the facility.

At capacity, the factory could turn out enough solar cells each year to generate 430 megawatts of electricity, said Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen. That's enough electricity to power about 325,000 homes. By comparison, all solar manufacturing plants in the United States combined currently produce enough cells each year to generate 153 megawatts.

Backers of solar power said the project is the latest example of how demand for solar is rapidly expanding, and how the technology, once the realm of hippies and back-to-the-land advocates, has become a hot commodity among some of the same Silicon Valley engineers and venture capitalists who made a fortune in the 1990s during the Internet boom.

... Nanosolar and other companies, such as Miasole, a privately held San Jose firm, have discarded silicon as their semiconductor material. Instead, they are working on mass-producing a complicated new technology: printing photovoltaic cells onto flexible plastic and foil, using a copper alloy that absorbs light and creates electricity.

The goal is to dramatically bring down costs, which have been the main stumbling block for expanding solar.