Going for Broke

Harold McMaster, founder of Solar Cells, Inc., hopes to universalize solar energy, but has put off making a buck to take RD further. But will his goal of making history destroy his company first?

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Harold McMaster could change the world by inventing the first cost-efficient solar-energy panel. Or he could break his company trying

Big things can happen in unlikely places--such as Solar Cells Inc. (SCI), in the nondescript engineering building on the campus of the University of Toledo.

Last fall, after 11 years of dogged labor, SCI's scientists had what amounted to a eureka moment when they perfected a technique for depositing photovoltaic cells--semiconductors that convert sunlight to electricity --on glass to create a solar panel. The breakthrough amounted to a huge advance in manufacturing efficiency, as it allowed SCI to coat one two-foot-by-four-foot panel every 30 seconds. That left rivals eating a lot of dust. BP Solar, a subsidiary of the oil giant British Petroleum and probably SCI's closest competitor, requires six hours to coat a panel two feet by five feet.

There are other reasons that SCI's panel stands out. It seems to be at least as efficient as other panels--and possibly more so--in converting sunlight to electricity, and unlike many panels, it suffers no apparent degradation in the natural environment. Ken Zweibel, who heads the Thin Film Partnership program at the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, Colo., says there are many promising solar companies and technologies, but SCI is clearly the pick of the litter. "Right now Solar Cells is the one thin-film company that has the potential to revolutionize the [solar] industry," says Zweibel. He estimates that SCI's technology may have as much as a five-year lead on the pack.

SCI's breakthrough has coincided with the awareness that, by the turn of the century, fossil fuels must yield to sources of energy that are cleaner, more plentiful, and less politically volatile. In 1997 worldwide demand for solar energy grew a torrid 40% over the prior year. John Browne, CEO of British Petroleum, thinks global warming is a fact, not a hypothesis, and he intends to make BP Solar a $1-trillion business within 10 years. Royal Dutch Shell foresees a $250-million investment in solar energy over the next 5 years. Both companies have visited SCI on many occasions, as have a number of utilities and glass manufacturers. SCI receives letters daily from villages in the developing world inquiring about the prospect of solar electrification. "They're all now starting to come to us. We're on our way," boasts SCI president Michael J. Cicak. "It's incredible. The only people who can screw this up now is us."

Success and acclaim are causing raised expectations for the small, research-intensive company, and a screwup is not beyond imagining. After all, in 12 years SCI has consumed $35 million ($12 million of it from U.S. taxpayers) and has yet to return a dime to investors. SCI, for all its shining promise, seems to be caught in the classic small-company squeeze between the ongoing seduction of cutting-edge research and development and the hard inevitability of the marketplace. Steven Johnson, the company's director of market development, readily admits that "success for us now is as much a maturing of the organization as anything else."

If there is doubt about the company's future, some of it may be laid at the feet of SCI's dominant--and dominating--founder, Harold A. McMaster, who is invariably defined in hopeful terms such as "visionary" and "genius." McMaster, already credited with being a pioneer and a revolutionary in the glass industry, seems bent on repeating the feat in the solar industry. "Harold's a very creative man who likes to see big things happen in a short period of time," says Bob Nicholson, a process engineer and technician who worked at SCI from 1990 to 1995. He argues that McMaster is the rare inventor and technologist who, like Bill Gates, seeks "hyperleaps" that others often cannot even discern, much less essay.

But in his Gatesian quest to make the hyperleap into the 21st century and solar-energy history, McMaster may have made a fateful choice. In search of entrepreneurial immortality, his critics argue, he may have doomed his very creation, SCI, to a premature death. Eschewing opportunities that might put SCI on sound financial footing in the short term, McMaster has sought instead to rapidly scale up a technology in which the science is complex, the learning curve is steep, and the likelihood of hitting technical snags is considerable.

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