It's sort of funny -- the University of Toledo is as close to my home and office as Michigan State University, but because of that arbitrary line and the sign that says "Welcome to Ohio" it might as well be Mars.
Well, this being the GREAT LAKES IT Report, after all, I paid a little visit last week to one of the coolest concepts for a tech incubator that I've ever seen.
The Wright Center for Photovoltaic Innovation and Commercialization is in a 48,000-square-foot former machine shop at the southeast corner of the UT campus called Research and Technology Complex 1. It was established in January 2007 with $18.6 million from the Ohio Development Department and $32 million from industry.
The center, with support from UT as well as Bowling Green State University and Ohio State, was established as a renewable energy incubator for solar, wind and biomass companies. A second 48,000-square-foot building is going up just north of the building where the UT PVIC is based; when it's finished, the PVIC's building will be for solar companies only.
Despite its relatively young age, the PVIC has already produced two "graduate" companies that have moved out to their own space -- Xunlight, in Toledo, which employs about 70 manufaturing amorphous-silicon solar cells, and Solar Fields, now a joint venture with Germany's Q-cells, the largest solar company in the world. Today there are 10 solar companies at work in the PVIC, where the interior lab space is still being built out.
Solar power seems a natural for a city with a long heritage in the glass industry, and at a university where the football stadium is called the Glass Bowl. And in fact the univerisity's work with solar power dates back to the mid-1980s in the work of Harold McMaster, the inventor of tempered glass, who was a professor at Ohio State and an engineer for Libby Owens Ford.
According to Detroit Edison retiree Norman J. Stevens, who is co-director of the PVIC, Ohio is a hotbed for solar development because its renewable portfolio standard mandates that those selling electricity in the state must generate 0.5 percent of it with solar power by 2024 -- which could mean up to 800 megawatts of new installed solar capacity in the state.
Stevens and Frank J. Calzonetti, UT vice president for research development, said the I-75 corridor between Toledo and Auburn Hills-based United Solar Ovonic is becoming "an anchor for the solar industry."
"We are going to have seven module manufacturers right here," Stevens said. "Then you have Uni-Solar 90 miles away from us. You are creating a corridor here that is going to be the heart of the solar industry in the U.S."
Most of the companies in the PVIC will be working on thin flexible solar panels. NASA will also have a solar cell testing center.
The real advantage of an incubator in an academic setting is, of course, access to students, the two men said.
"Engineering students can walk over here between classes, faculty members can walk here, and just about every company in this incubator has a research relationship with the univeristy and its help in securing funding," Calzonetti said. "An incubator not associated with a university does not have those advantages."
More at www.utoledo.edu/research/PVIC.
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