Secretive Silicon Valley company, OptiSolar, builds largest solar farm
A secretive Hayward, Calif. company has just announced it will build the largest solar power “farm” in North America, using solar cells manufactured in Silicon Valley.
The site, near Sarnia in Ontario, Canada, will be enough to power between 10,000 and 15,000 homes on sunny days, drawing on a monstrous 40-megawatt capacity. The company, called OptiSolar, is backed by private equity firms apparently with oil connections. It has studiously avoided saying anything until this announcement.
The deal is significant, not merely for its size, but because it was scooped by such an unknown company. Why wasn’t public company SunPower in the mix, for example? One clue is OptiSolar’s model, which does soup to nuts, unlike most others. It does everything, from manufacturing the solar cells to generating the power on-site and then selling the power through the regional grid. Usually, the manufacturing and sales processes are separate. It also uses thin-film silicon technology, which gives it an advantage because it uses less amounts of expensive silicon...
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