By oxidizing polyacetylene, a long-chain molecule which acts like a pigment, the researchers found the polymer to have extraordinarily high conductive properties.

“We realized it in a classic ‘ah ha moment,’” says Heeger. “But then over and over again, we saw additional properties that we had not foreseen.”

Eventually, Heeger and his colleagues, Alan MacDiarmind and Hideki Shirakawa, figured out that the material was not just a novelty. It had the potential to change the way we manufacture electronic devices, transistors, diodes and solar cells. These semiconducting polymers could be put in a solution and printed on a substrate – potentially creating a revolution in electronics that rivals what Gutenberg’s printing press did for books 600 years earlier.

“Printing is a low-cost, high speed manufacturing process…I doubt that there’s a lower-cost manufacturing for any solar technology,” says Heeger.

The science community agreed. In 2000, the three researchers received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work.

A year later Heeger co-founded Konarka, a Massachussets-based company working to commercialize organic solar PV technologies. The company has since racked up tens of millions of dollars in financing and has built a GW-scale manufacturing facility that produces “power plastic,” a flexible material that can be integrated into bags, electronics, and building materials.

With all this promising sounding news, one might think that the revolution in printed organic PV is underway. But that’s definitely not the case. A number of technical challenges and changing market conditions have made it difficult for third-generation solar companies to ramp up production and sell products.

“Clearly the industry had a good story to tell,” says technology journalist Peter Fairley. “But that story has since changed and I think things look very different today for these companies.”

During the height of the silicon shortage between 2005 and 2007, interest in emerging third-generation solar technologies was strong. The high price of silicon made printable, non-silicon based solar products look very attractive. Never mind that they were only 4 to 5 percent efficient and lasted for only a few years – roll-to-roll printing below a dollar per watt was an attractive selling point.

Then came Cadmium Telluride thin-film producer First Solar, which said it was manufacturing 11-percent efficient products below a dollar per watt. It quickly steamrolled its way to the top of global module producers.

The eventual easing of the silicon shortage and the global oversupply of PV caused a roughly 30% drop in prices, making traditional PV technologies more attractive than they’ve ever been. This has taken some of the spotlight off the third-gen PV industry as well.

Konarka may have a GW-scale manufacturing facility, but they don’t appear to be shipping anywhere close to that amount of product.

“I don’t believe that Konarka is producing a GW of material a year,” says Fairley. “They have to find buyers and people who want a GW of their material. And that’s still the number one challenge.”

With such low efficiencies and short product lifetimes, third-generation PV companies are trying to find a unique niche rather than taking traditional PV head-on. Applications like portable chargers, solar clothing, solar umbrellas and roll-out awnings are the most obvious. And after that, windows and building facades are a potentially promising area. Companies are already installing small building integrated systems, but organic solar technologies need to get much more efficient in order to achieve real scale.

“In the laboratory today, people are making these organic solar cells with peak power efficiencies in the range of 6 to 8 percent. We should be able to get twice that – and that’s our challenge,” says Konarka’s Heeger.

Success in the lab does not necessarily mean success in the market. However, these technologies have moved fairly quickly from research to reality. And if the progress continues, organic PV may someday be competitive with more traditional solar products – someday being the key word.

“It seems premature to call the technology commercialized,” says Fairley. “Many of the products that we’ve heard about have failed to materialize.”

To hear interviews with Alan Heeger and Peter Fairley, listen to the podcast linked above. To see a video clip of Konarka’s manufacturing facility, watch the video below.

Wind technologies have come a long way over the last 30 years, starting as custom-made amalgamations of farm machinery in Denmark and lab experiments in the U.S., and evolving to become the giant sentries of today’s energy transition.

As the turbines have gotten larger and more sophisticated, wind power has become the fastest-growing energy source in the world, with 37.5 gigawatts (GW) of capacity added last year. The Global Wind Energy Council expects wind to grow by 160% globally over the next five years, driven largely by bigger machines.

According to the Department of Energy’s 2009 Wind Technology Report, the average size wind turbine installed in the United States in 2008 was 1.67 megawatts (MW) and the average project size was 83 MW. While the average size of projects was down from 120 MW in 2007 due to the financial crisis, the figures were still larger than any other year. And in Europe, machines of 2 MW and above have accounted for more than half of total installations since 2005, according to Emerging Energy Research.

Any side-by-side comparison between “large” turbines of the past and present is astonishing.

Take the Vestas 33-kW turbine released in 1979: With a rotor diameter of 10 meters, the machine looks like a toy compared with the company’s new 3-MW, 112-meter rotor diameter turbine. And these newer 2 and 3-MW turbines are now being outdone by offshore machines in the 5-10 MW range produced by companies like Clipper, Enercon and REpower.

“I never imagined they’d get as big as they are. I look at the early machines now and they look like bicycles to me – they’re just tiny,” says Benjamin Bell, President and CEO of Garrad Hassan North America.

A dramatic visual comparison can make it seem like the industry has taken nothing but leaps and bounds in size and technology improvements. But the transition – which occurred over decades of trial and error – has come from incremental improvements in technology rather than dramatic shifts, says Bell.

Wind Expert Paul Gipe agrees. As turbines reach 10 MW of capacity – and there are plans to go as high as 20 MW – he questions whether the industry needs to keep focusing on larger-size turbines.

“The wind turbines don’t really need to get any larger. They’re big enough,” says Gipe. “There’s sometimes this obsession with going bigger and bigger and it’s not necessarily the size turbine that matters as much.”

Gipe says the most important innovations in modern wind turbines are features like variable speed generation and sophisticated power electronics that allow wind farm operators to regulate voltage. Without such systems, wind farms couldn’t get as large as they are today.

The story of Benjamin Bell’s career offers an interesting glimpse at the importance of those features, as well as how wind technologies have moved from one company to another over the years, getting tweaked and refined along the way.

Bell got his start in the wind industry as a student at the University of Massachusetts in the mid-1970′s where he helped design and construct one of the first modern commercial wind turbines in the U.S. The 25-kW machine, called the Wind Furnace 1 (WF-1), was built with features that are found on most wind turbines today: three fiberglass blades that “spilled” the wind, a variable-speed rotor that increased operational efficiency and the first SCADA system controlled by a room full of Apple IIe computers.

“There was a lot of experimentation…but a lot of the technology that was developed on those small machines is still in use today,” Bell says.

The generation of machines before the WF-1 were based on fixed-pitch, fixed-speed turbines produced in Denmark by agricultural manufacturers. While the so-called “Danish Concept” seemed rudimentary compared with this new device, the Danish wind turbines proved to be some of the most rugged machines ever built.

“If you look at what wind turbines survived over the years, it was the ones made in Denmark,” says Paul Gipe, who worked on many of the early turbines. “That was because of they took a bottom-up approach with farmers and agricultural companies developing them with off-the-shelf components.”

In the late 70′s, with the U.S. and Denmark starting to compete technologically, a company called U.S. Windpower was formed to commercialize the WF-1. Bell went to work for the company, which in 1980 developed the first wind farm in the world – a project in New Hampshire made up of 20 30-kW turbines. The project ended up failing. The wind