ENVIRONMENT:A Trinity College graduate from Bray has raised $5 million (€3.4 million) in a fourth instalment of financing for his company's plans to manufacture flexible thin-film solar cells.
The money, raised from asset finance firm Atel Ventures, is part of an equipment lease finance package and brings the total amount raised by Conrad Burke's (pictured right) firm, Innovalight, to $47 million (€32 million).
Based in Sunnyvale, near San Francisco, the company plans to open a 30,000sq ft factory later this year, where it will make solar cells that feature tiny nano-particles of silicon rather than the more common and more costly silicon crystal wafers.
The process, being pioneered by Innovalight, bears similarities to how inkjet printers print ink onto paper, in that it will coat surfaces with an ink-like liquid containing nano-size silicon crystal dots.
Burke's firm is one of many competing to mass-produce solar cells that cost about 10 per cent of those currently available. The market that is predicted to be worth $36 billion (€24 billion) by 2010.
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