Heliovolt cashes in

Sparking further "cleantech bubble" rumblings, thin-film solar company Heliovolt announced this week the closing of its Series B funding round with a total of $101 million in investments. The company says it will use the money to ramp up manufacturing and global deployments, using its patented manufacturing process to dramatically reduce the cost of solar.

Austin-based Heliovolt's business model centers around using copper indium gallium selenium (CIGS) technology to make building materials capable of converting sunlight into power. Heliovolt CEO Billy Stanbery was quoted on Cnet in 2006 describing his vision of "power buildings" that are made with various thin-film-solar-coated building materials and harvest enough energy to power themselves.

The company began making prototypes of its thin-film modules in 2006 and says a substantial portion of the funds may go toward building a proposed 20-megawatt manufacturing facility. The funds will also go toward co-locating production facilities with its manufacturing partners to create traditional solar panels and flexible solar building products for both domestic and international customers, according to the company.

In addition to the flexibility of thin-film and its ability to coat building materials, Heliovolt says its patented FASST process is 10 to 100 times faster than currently available processes, is less expensive to produce, and 100 times thinner than traditional silicon.

In a statement announcing the funding, Ron Bernal, a general partner with Sequel Venture Partners, one of the round's participants, said HelioVolt's FASST manufacturing process was one of the most technologically and economically attractive in both the CIGS category and the solar sector as a whole.

Meanwhile the surprisingly large investment has others in the VC community asking, as Rob Day of @Ventures did in his Cleantech Investing blog "Is Heliovolt’s $101mm Series B a sign of things to come, or does it mark an inflection point in the solar sector?"