http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/03/news/companies/sunpower_solar.fortune/?postversion=2007100403For solar power, the future looks bright
Solar energy is now very real. And at hot companies like SunPower, the 'green' that matters is money - by the billions, writes Fortune's Marc Gunther.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Marc Gunther, Fortune
October 4 2007: 3:33 AM EDT
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Today, like the rest of the solar energy industry, SunPower is heating up. With electricity prices rising, worries about global warming mounting, and the cost of solar energy falling, the business of making electricity from the sun is about to go mainstream in a big way.
The Holy Grail of solar is a concept called "grid parity" - meaning that it costs no more to generate your own solar energy than it does to buy electricity retail, off the grid - and there's smart money betting that solar will get there soon. In the case of SunPower, that money comes from a legendary Silicon Valley character named T.J. Rodgers, whom we'll meet shortly.
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Since going public two years ago, SunPower's stock price has grown by about 450%, from $18 a share to $82 when Fortune went to press, giving the company a market capitalization of nearly $7 billion. That's a little bigger than Whole Foods Market.
While the solar industry as a whole remains small - less than 1% of the electricity in the U.S. - it's exploding. The market for solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, which use cells made of crystalline silicon to turn sunlight into electricity, has grown by an average of 42% annually since 2002. Industry leaders, most based in Japan and Germany, are ramping up production, as are Chinese manufacturers like Suntech, whose founder and CEO, Dr. Zhengrong Shi, is one of China's richest men.
Big companies, including BP (Charts), General Electric (Charts, Fortune 500), Mitsubishi, Sanyo, Sharp, and Shell (Charts), all want to grow their solar businesses. In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, venture capital investors like John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, entrepreneur Bill Gross, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are backing startups that claim they will revolutionize the industry.
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