Professor Walajabad Sampath, director of Colorado State University’s Materials Engineering Laboratory, has invented a new way to manufacture high-efficiency solar panels that costs less than US $1 a watt. His invention means that for the first time the cost of generating solar electricity could roughly equal that of traditionally generated electricity.

Sampath’s continuous, automated manufacturing process for solar panels uses glass coating with a cadmium telluride thin film instead of the standard high-cost crystalline silicon. Because the process produces high efficiency devices (ranging from 11% to 13%) at a very high rate and yield, it can be done much more cheaply than with existing technologies. The cost to the consumer could be as low as $2 per watt, about half the current cost of solar panel electricity. This price competes well with the normal cost of power from the electrical grid in many parts of the world.

Meanwhile the panels go into mass-producing electricity in a new 200-megawatt factory in Colorado, expected to employ up to 500 people. AVA Solar Inc will start production by the end of 2008. The factory will have the capacity to power 40,000 homes.

In the last 16 years annual global sales of photovoltaic technology have grown to approximately 2 gigawatts or two billion watts - roughly a $6 billion industry. Demand has increased nearly 40% a year for each of the past five years - a trend that is expected to continue.

By 2010, solar cell manufacturing is expected to be a $25 billion-plus industry.