Reported by Staff

Front Range communities and metro districts rely on several strong selling points when encouraging energy and cleantech-related businesses on locating to the region. Things like “an unmatched combination of smart, skilled people, leading federal energy labs and research universities, supportive energy policy, and dependable natural resources.”

It’s true, not hype, and now the state has another plus for the R&D part of the pitch, with the announcement that Colorado State University is launching a new Solar R&D Facility.

To be led by Abound Solar co-founder and CSU Professor, W. S. Sampath, it will be called the rather lengthy … National Science Foundation Industry and University Cooperative Research Program, and be located on the Fort Collins campus. The NSF is providing funding of $450,000 over five years. Industry participants will contribute a total of $400,000 per year and include 5N Plus, Pilkington, Ion Edge Corp. and MBI Corp.

Abound Solar, one of the university’s most successful spinoffs with more than 300 employees, will take a leadership role in the new CSU center.

“With current technologies, we can convert about 10 percent of sunlight into electricity and the goal [of the new CSU research program] is to double or triple that, which will make solar electricity more commercially attractive,” Sampath said in a statement. “We’ve built a machine that will explore a whole bunch of ideas.”

Sampath said the new program has an industrial advisory board that will decide what projects to pursue and which will have “some rights with regard to the intellectual property.” Sampath will serve as the center’s principal investigator. Other key researchers are V. “Mani” Manivannan and Hiroshi Sakurai, professors in mechanical engineering at CSU’s College of Engineering, and Jim Sites, a physics professor and associate dean of Research for the Fort Collins university’s College of Natural Sciences.

Sampath and colleagues Al Enzenroth and Kurt Barth began to investigate low-cost photovoltaics in Sampath’s materials-engineering lab at CSU in the early 1990s. They formed a spinoff — originally called AVA Solar and now known as Abound Solar — in 2007 with support from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden.

The company opened its first production plant in Longmont last year, and its research lab is located in Fort Collins.