A Boone company and an Iowa State research center are working to make a better light-trap with some newly received grants worth almost $4 million.

Iowa Thin Film Technologies, Inc. of Boone, in a joint project with ISU’s Microelectronics Research Center, recently received two contracts worth $3.7 million over five years for research and development on the manufacturing of lightweight solar panels. ITFT makes lightweight, flexible solar panels for electrical power generation using a unique thin film photovoltaic material.

ITFT solar modules have many applications according to Lynne W. Brookes, executive administrator at ITFT, including portable field power for scientific, military and other outdoor uses and supplying power in space where payload weights are important.

“We have delivered a couple of modules to companies who are using them on satellites going up,” said ITFTPresident Frank Jeffrey. “There is a program run by NASA called the Small Satellite Technology Initiative. They are putting up a couple of small satellites with a lot of new technologies to try out.”

The modules also have uses for consumer electronics and the company has designed units for camping lanterns, two-way radios, wildlife migration tracking monitors, bicycles and sporting equipment.

The company received $2.7 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The purpose of this grant is to develop and improve the technology to manufacture solar cells less expensively and to improve their performance for more power per square foot, said Jeffrey.

ITFT received an additional $1 million from a $10 million consortium project with the federally funded Advanced Research Project Agency to further develop the process of manufacturing the modules. Jeffrey said the research funded by these grants will expand the applications of solar technology by improving the performance of the material and reducing the cost of making it.

“What we learn from the research and development is going to help us manufacture material at a lot lower cost,” he said. “Each time you chop down the cost a little bit, the markets that you can serve go up quite a bit. Hopefully by the end of the contract we will have manufacturing costs that would make it cost effective to mount roof panels on houses in the U.S., and feed power into the grid off those to compete with coal fire generation. We are really trying to bring the costs down to the point where it is a strong cost-competitive technology in the U.S.”

Jeffrey said that it is hard to get manufacturing costs for solar power generation down because other forms of power generation are very highly subsidized in the U.S.

“Coal and oil have always tended to enjoy pretty strong tax benefits,” he said. “They have been heavily subsidized. It is hard to break into a situation like that.”

Markets for photovoltaics and other renewable energies are growing very fast outside the United States, because energy costs are much higher elsewhere. Jeffrey said that in Europe there are higher taxes on energy to pay for damage to communities and the environment that results from burning fossil fuels.

Jeffrey got his Ph. D. from ISU and he began working on this project in 1983 when he was at 3M. There, he presented a proposal to do large scale solar cell manufacture at low cost.

“After we made some of the initial developments,” Jeffrey said, “3M decided it wasn’t in their main business area. They dropped it and Derrick Grimmer [vice president of Iowa Thin Film Technologies] and I decided that we had put a lot of years into this and we wanted to see it work, so we left 3M and came to Iowa State. Things are looking very good right now. It’s a neat area because it is a very interesting material and process from a scientific viewpoint. It has the potential for being very beneficial to the world as a whole. You kind of win all ways with this.”