I spoke with Stan a short while before he died. This is appropriate: “He died with his boots on.” He was a true, national hero to the end!
It had become difficult to converse with Stan, due to his halting speech, but his mind was still working brilliantly! After he left Energy Conversion Devices, he founded Ovshinsky Innovations and Ovshinsky Solar. Ovshinsky Solar was funded privately by Stan ($6 million at one point). This article provides some update.
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20120101/SUB01/301019961/quest-for-holy-grail-of-solar-drives-ovshinsky#
I did a patent search and found many new patents issued to him. And, the work is profoundly important. He, and coworkers, had accomplished *demonstrated* 300 Angstroms per sec deposition speeds for high-quality thin PV films (and, by inference, for many other important products based on thin films). This is about 150 times faster than prior thin-film deposition speeds, and about 10 to 20 times faster than UniSolar was setting up to do -- and even that much lesser speed at UniSolar (based on Stan's earlier work) was expected to make UniSolar PVs cost competitive with other PVs!
What a tragedy! The puny support for PV R&D in the U.S. is what caused UniSolar to fail! The push for profitable overall operations was premature, and the result was a loss of Stan, and much wasted money -- and a failed highly-promising PV company. This is a national disgrace!!
The “big” push for the DOE now is to develop PVs that are directly competitive with coal-fired electricity. And, Stan’s latest work provides a sound basis for doing that! But, the DOE did not have enough funds to support all the promising projects; and Stan went “hungry”. (The DOE was far less than brilliant in using the meager funds they had for the purpose!).
The U.S. is apt to pay very, very dearly for its short-sightedness in supporting R&D; particularly PV R&D. As a side note: Stan had visited China not long before his death – to beg for money, I suppose. Perhaps the Chinese will be eventually be the ones to profit hugely from Stan’s inventions. My fervent hope, though, is that Ovshinsky Solar will find U.S. funds to commercialize their huge break-through in PV film deposition. |
