Green Giants – Episode 16

Thin-Film Solar in Space: Inside Ascent Solar’s Revolutionary Tech

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Transcript

Wes Ashworth (00:01.07)

Welcome to another episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy. Today ,we’re joined by Paul Warley, CEO of Ascent Solar Technologies. Paul brings decades of experience across multiple industries, including strategic advisory, capital advisory, and executive management services. Before leading Ascent Solar, Paul was president of Warley and Company, where he worked with middle market companies in sectors ranging from oil and gas to clean energy. He has also served as CEO and CFO of 360 Imaging and has worked as a managing director with Deloitte Corporate Finance, where he focused on the alternative energy industry. With an impressive background that spans major roles at GE Capital and Bank of America, Paul is uniquely positioned to lead Ascent Solar in its mission to revolutionize solar technology, particularly in the space and aerospace sectors. Today, we’ll explore Ascent Solar’s innovative thin film solar technology, its applications in space, and the exciting trends shaping the future of the renewable energy industry.

Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Warley (01:01.126)

Thank you, Wes.

Wes Ashworth (01:02.626)

Yeah, so we’ll start out, can you just give us just a brief kind of bit about your background and how you first got involved in the renewable energy sector?

Paul Warley (01:12.504)

Sure. I actually first got involved in the renewable energy sector back in the early 90s. I helped raise capital for the first landfill gas recovery unit that the ultimate off-taker was waste management. Basically, that was the start of their billion-dollar subsidiary that basically uses that gas to use all the to fuel all their trucks.

Wes Ashworth (01:45.654)

Yeah, wow.

Wes Ashworth (01:49.836)

Yeah, okay, no kidding. And then what kind of brought you to modern day? You were early on kind of involved in that energy sector or getting involved, but now you’re fully in it. So tell us about that a little bit.

Paul Warley (01:53.765)

So yeah, I got involved again doing energy efficiency projects at GE Capital. Then when I went to work for Deloitte, I was part of the international green team and so I spent probably 30 or 50 % of my time on renewables or green energy or companies in that sector. I sold the US Green Building Council their show that they put on. I sold that for USGBC and then also sold a bunch of solar facilities for several different customers.

Wes Ashworth (02:33.389)

Right. Okay. Got it. Okay, cool. And so kind of bringing us to current day with you leading Ascent Solar, can you give us just a brief overview of Ascent Solar technologies and really its primary focus?

Paul Warley (03:11.218)

Sure. I was brought in in December of 2022. I was brought in as the CFO and we were getting ready to raise capital round. I really got in too late to make too much influence over the capital round. But then, and I knew what drove me to the company. I had done some consulting work a year earlier and also the chairman of the board and I go back 25 or 30 years. And so that’s how I got in. Then decided to get rid of the old CEO and I took over as CEO. And then we started effectively, had, was a very simple mission. They had a lot of customers that said we had to get to a certain efficiency or watts produced. And so basically I tasked the team to basically improve efficiencies. And we did that. We went from right around 10 % efficiencies up into the upper teens of efficiencies. And that opened up some doors. It’s still a long, but it reopened up doors where we had relationship with customers. And so we’re really targeting one primary sector and that is solar and space.

Then secondarily, we’re looking at what we call agrivoltaics. And we have put, which may start to reemerge here very quickly, drones. So those are the three areas we’re focusing.

Wes Ashworth (04:59.992)

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sure. And for those that don’t know, aren’t familiar with Ascent Solar, aren’t familiar with your particular product, how is it different? So when people hear solar, obviously they’re thinking traditional solar panel, how is Ascent Solar different in the product and can you give us just a basic kind of understanding of just the product in general?

Paul Warley (05:28.484)

Okay Wes, the best way is to show it. Okay? So we can roll our product up like Christmas paper. Okay? There’s nothing, there’s really nothing out there quite like this. The Chinese do have a thin film solar array, but it also uses silicate, which is glass. So our differentiation there is we are five or six times lighter than that, and we tend to range anywhere from 10 to 20 times lighter than normal solar. That is very important when you’re going up into space when it costs anywhere from eight to $50,000 a kilogram to take any product up to the lower orbit. And then when you’re talking about going to the moon, it’s $400,000 to a million dollars a kilogram.

Wes Ashworth (06:36.738)

Yeah, yeah, huge. And for anybody listening that can’t see it, he just pulled out the thin film panel. It’s thin as can be. And it really, when you roll it up, it looks like a Christmas wrapping paper, you know, how compact it gets. I remember the first time you showed me that, I was amazed at that. to give a visual out there, yeah, that is super cool. And yeah, go ahead.

Paul Warley (06:59.728)

Some of the other quick advantages are we don’t create space debris when stuff hits our product. That’s a big deal now with the amount of satellites up in the air. And also we don’t tend to shine as much in space, which makes the astrologers more happy.

Wes Ashworth (07:30.574)

Right, absolutely. And some of those specifics and space debris and other kind of pieces we’ll dig into as we get going. But yeah, just a high-level overview of some of those differences, which is great. What are some of the other, I guess, unique advantages of thin film solar technology compared to, again, the traditional silicon -based solar panel?

Paul Warley (07:52.067)

Silicon based panels are, they do have higher efficiencies to start with. Our degradation tends not to be as high as their degradation. after five years, and this is in space, after five years, we’re probably even. Okay. So that’s great, but you can actually add a little bit more of our product to an array and come up with the same power being produced, and we’re improving that every day. I mean, we’re running an experimental run today with five different possibilities on the outcome.

Wes Ashworth (08:34.764)

Yeah. And where do you said, where was that efficiency? I think you had mentioned where it was kind of when you started early on versus where it is today.

Paul Warley (08:43.474)

I’ll give you some generalities. We basically started around 10 % efficiencies, but we were at four or five watts per our smaller module, okay? So then we’ve increased the size. We now run a Titan, which is 300 millimeters by 300 millimeters. And so we’re up into, we’re up to 14, close to 14 watts.

Wes Ashworth (09:22.818)

Yeah, okay, cool. And then what’s the, is there, I guess is there a target, you know, where you’re striving to be from the efficiency standpoint or is that, yeah, maybe in the near future about as high as you’re gonna get it.

Paul Warley (09:37.298)

If we can get up into 16 and a half to 17 and a half, that would take care of about 95 plus percent of the market.

Wes Ashworth (09:49.078)

Yeah, got it. Okay, cool. And then thinking about this, these thin film panels going up into space, like what are some of the primary applications, how these are used, why they’re used, anything related to that topic?

Paul Warley (10:06.513)

Okay, well all satellites have batteries, okay. So solar would be, because when a satellite’s going around, there’s darkness and there’s light. So during the light periods, the solar will recharge the battery and so on. it’s really, unless it’s a nuclear satellite, it basically runs the base, runs the power to run a satellite.

And then, so that’s the primary use for that. And then the secondary use, which is just starting to come back, is beaming power. So you could have a, call it a one megawatt array in the middle of space, and then beam power to satellites. And that would mean you could use less panels on a satellite.

Wes Ashworth (11:11.214)

Got it. Okay, cool. And one of the other things I think the advantages with your technology is high radiation environments, of course you’re going to encounter in space. guess what about the product makes it particularly suitable for space applications and performing in high radiation environments?

Paul Warley (11:30.061)

Our product does well in high radiation environments. We pass NASA and JAXA. JAXA is the Japanese equivalent to NASA. So we’ve passed those tests on radiation. And so we actually perform very well, and there’s different types of coatings we put on it. And some coatings help us, last longer than other, but any solar, if it was bare, is going to have some issue with radiation. So regular solar has glass. have FEP is what we’re probably going to use on a go -forward basis because it gives us more power production capability.

Wes Ashworth (12:25.454)

Okay, awesome. And then too, you touched on this earlier. If you saw the video, you saw how thin the panel is, how does that, and if you can get more into the weight and rollability of an Ascent Solar panel, how does it provide a competitive edge in space missions? I know you did talk about weight and those kinds of things as well, but how does that specifically, I guess, give that competitive advantage?

Paul Warley (12:51.94)

Sure. Right now, the Chinese have capabilities of rolled, but again, it does have silicon in it. So, as you perfectly stated it, we could roll up like Christmas paper, and they’re gonna roll up kinda like this. Okay? So, why would you want it to roll? Okay? Now it’s rolling over here on my computer, excuse me. So why you would want it to roll, the defense departments of all the countries in the world track satellites primarily by how their profile is.

So when satellites go around the world, there are places where you’re not seeing the satellite. And so what you do is if you roll up your solar and it comes out the other side, they’re not going to know that’s your satellite. OK? And you can also then reposition it while it’s dark. And then you roll it up. And then it comes, it’s coming out someplace that they didn’t think about.

Wes Ashworth (14:12.418)

Right, yeah, so beyond just, you know, it’s obviously providing options that are better for the environment, you know, less waste and, and there’s a lot of implications there with cost and those sort of things as well. Degradation, space debris, which we’ll talk about, but beyond all that too, it’s like there’s a security component, you know, with your product as well, you know, in that and that roll ability. So a lot of great, great benefits, I guess, specific to the cost implications. So thinking about the weight, thinking about all those durability, whatever it might be, what are the cost implications of using your technology for space -based solar power and some of the advantages?

Paul Warley (14:50.578)

I can sum that up very quickly. In space base, we’re the low, we tend to be in the lower third, definitely the lower half of cost. And on the ground, we tend to be in the, we would be in the top 10 % of cost. And the advantages are we don’t have as much degradation. And even on the ground, there are some key things. It’s easy to, it would be easier to install. You just roll it out on a rooftop. don’t ever, it would be, it’s going to be years and years and years before you see us, you know, substitution of a panel on the ground. Yeah.

Wes Ashworth (15:36.308)

Right. And is that primarily the efficiency differences? Is that the major hurdle with that? Sure. Okay. Which is why that yeah, some of these applications like space and other applications where that that cost justification makes sense. That’s where those are coming in. Besides space, what are some other market segments where thin film solar is being utilized. I know we touched a little bit on drones, agrivoltaics that you mentioned as well earlier.

Paul Warley (16:08.782)

So drones are interesting. We’re using them, or we had some clients years ago, five, six years ago. But then drones started to be more easily tracked, and so they became one -way products. So in battle, most drones go.

Wes Ashworth (16:30.606)

Which is wild to think about.

Paul Warley (16:36.442)

They do their thing, but they don’t make it back. They’ll try to make it back, but they tend not to make it back. So that kind of eliminated necessarily the need for solar on drones. What’s making it a promising environment now is high altitude drones. You could beam power from space into an area and that would recharge the drones. And so they would have a panel to recharge the drones. So you could fly the drones 24 -7 rather than flying a large drone at 100 ,000 feet or 80 ,000 feet. It could stay up there rather than flying for 12 to 20 hours. And you’re having to bring it down.

Wes Ashworth (17:28.066)

Got it. Yeah, that’s incredibly interesting. And then what about the Agrivoltaic side? I know that’s another area you’re exploring and some use cases there, but just curious to learn a bit more about how the product is used in those type of environments.

Paul Warley (17:43.986)

It’s basically the advantages in the agrivoltaics market is we are a good bit more expensive. However, ours is hung up at, call it three to five meters above the ground. And the farm equipment can drive under our stuff, so you can still farm and you’re only going to lose 5 to 0 % of your crops. So, you still have the crop income rather than plowing up the farm fields and then turning it into solar. And there’s a trend, especially in Europe, you can’t replace farms with solar in most European countries. There’s some places in Canada that are not doing it. And there’s a start of a movement in the US, but the US has so much more land that it’s not as huge of a deal. And in Southeast Asia, some of the large cities, our product would work very well, because if farming, as the city grows and the farms are being replaced by solar, it would be better to use a different product and then you can still have the farm.

Wes Ashworth (19:20.674)

Yeah, okay, got it. And thinking about the just the development, the future, where the technology is going. So, what are some of those the biggest challenges you face in further developing and deploying thin film solar technology out there?

Paul Warley (19:38.064)

Well, I mean, right now, my plan can do approximately five megawatts if I ran it 24 -7 a year. The market size is much bigger than that. I would have to expand with orders. So you have all the issues of getting parts and components in or buying machinery and equipment. Some of our stuff could be we could have new equipment in eight to ten months. Some of the stuff would be 12 to 15 months. So that would be issue one.

Issue two is the cost. I’m trying to drive down costs. We’ve got an experiment now running with a perovskite company where we’re doing a J, starting kind of, I would call it a JV even though it, you know, we didn’t quote a JV. But, so we’ve got that going. If I can get my efficiency or watts produced up, then I can compete against the solar products. And then that would probably drive down my cost. It will drive down my cost per watt, which will make us more effective. And then finally, it’s where it’s a new technology, agrivoltaics is still new. I mean, there are a ton of articles around the world about it, of how good it is. But what happened for five or six years is they basically took a regular panel and instead of, you know, it’s at whatever angle it is, but instead of being, you know, 18 inches or 24 inches down at the bottom of the angle, they raised it up to five or six feet, but you lost 70 % of your crop. And so it just wasn’t good. you also had a lot of, replaced, you couldn’t run tractors under it. You couldn’t do anything like that. The reason it can’t go any higher, if you had a 40 or 50 mile an hour wind, that 100-pound panel flies off and becomes a projectile. Yeah.

Wes Ashworth (22:14.07)

Yeah. And then how specifically does your product not have those issues? in trying to piece it together and how that all works.

Paul Warley (22:21.202)

Okay, so if our product, let’s say, would be hanging at 12 feet and there would be gaps in it, so I would have a thin, thin piece of, it’d be mounted to a thin, thin piece of aluminum or zinc plating, and it would do that, but there would be space so the wind can go in between and it doesn’t act as a you know, projectile. The other thing that tends to rural solar, does it mean, whether it’s rural or not, hail storms. So, I don’t think my product’s gonna live through a hail storm that’s size of a baseball, but your normal hail, we should survive and regular solar may or may not depending on how you engineered it.

Wes Ashworth (23:20.952)

Sure. Yeah, and I know we touched on that. I am curious to dig into that a little bit more just in terms of the dependability. I think I heard maybe your panel had taken a bullet at some point, that if one maybe one little piece gets damaged, it doesn’t necessarily damage the entire array or those sort of things too. So curious to hear more about that as well.

Paul Warley (23:44.506)

All right, you want me to say a little bit about that now? All right, so I’m going to go back to my deal. So in our product, if a bullet went through here, it would basically, you would just take out the power production in the corner.

Wes Ashworth (23:46.392)

Yeah, get into it. Absolutely.

Paul Warley (24:04.388)

Okay, and we would still produce it. Whereas in a normal solar, that’s most likely gonna take out a minimum of this, if not the entire three panels, as you can see, it’s hooked in the middle. Okay, so it would potentially take out all of that production. Right.

Wes Ashworth (24:31.49)

Yeah, for anybody that, again, listening is rolling out that thin panel again. It’s broken into these little sections, but if it hits damage in one spot, it’s very minimal reduction, is obviously very important, especially in space and dealing with all the things that go on there. Before we switch a little bit, any upcoming innovations, projects that Ascent Solar is working on that you can share with us?

Paul Warley (24:58.916)

Other than this joint venture with the Proroskite Company, we’re running a couple different experiments, literally as we speak, to try to, through the design and then producing that new design basically on the side. If you see all these lines in here, maybe reducing the amount of lines and then as we’re reducing the amount of lines, it increases the power output a little bit more. So that’s stuff we’re experimenting with now.

Wes Ashworth (25:35.832)

Yeah, okay, got it. And to transition a little bit into some of environmental impact and I know space debris is a hot topic and getting more attention and seeing some other things come out in terms of to police that or kind of rectify the situation too. Talk to me a little bit about how Ascent Solar addresses the issue of space debris and sustainability in its products and some of the advantages that do exist.

Paul Warley (26:06.586)

Well, if our product was damaged by a solar storm or something, this product is flexible, it’s loose. And so if it goes hurling around, it’s not going to do as much damage as a piece of glass or a piece of metal. That’s really that simple. And it can survive a lot more of the solar storms than most solar, it’s becoming a huge issue because if you go back 10 years ago, there weren’t nearly as many satellites as there are up today and you’ve got a lot of satellites going up every year now.

Wes Ashworth (26:58.222)

Sure. Yeah, so it becomes more and more on an issue and I think even why technologies like yours are more and more important and critical as we go forward. Thinking about where you see things headed from your perspective. Obviously, you’ve had a lot of great experiences prior to doing this and have been in some of the other sectors of industry as well too, but I’m curious from your perspective in leading the charge there. What trends do you see shaping their future of the renewable energy sector? I guess particularly in solar technology, which is obviously your focus area.

Paul Warley (27:35.312)

The only concern I have with solar outside of space is, you know, certain, you’ve gotta support the grid. And so you have to have constant power. So the only way to do that with solar would be also have battery technology with it. So, you know, there are places around the world that have become proliferated with solar. You can’t really add too much more. Then also it’s not the older panels that are degrading and won’t operate. You can’t really recycle those. So you have a lot of waste issues. Some of the newer panels, I believe you can do that. But that’s my only comment on the terrestrial.

On the space solar, some of the trends are, think you’re gonna start, you’ll see more about power beaming, okay? And whether it’s NASA or SpaceX, you’re talking about, you know, moon and then going to Mars, it’s going to require a lot of power and it’s electric power. So because whether you’re going to launch your aircraft from the moon to go to Mars or you’re going to launch it, you know, 4000 meters kilometers above. So you’re in the outer orbit. You’re going to have refueling stations. And fuel can’t rise in temperature. I was going say it tends to explode. It’s not a tend, it explodes. And so you need a lot of solar for half the time that it’s in the sun, because it’ll heat up to above 200 degrees. So that requires a refrigeration unit, which uses a lot of power. And so you’re to have to have multiple refueling stations so you can take your spaceship up to these refueling stations and then finally when it gets to a point then it’ll go to Mars. So all of this requires a decent amount of power for really running this refueling stations, primarily keeping the fuel cool.

Wes Ashworth (30:26.914)

Yeah, without a doubt. It’s pretty, like when you talk about beaming power and things like that, it starts to get very futuristic in a way. Like, yeah, they’re exploring that. Is that something that’s kind of happening? Is it happening now? Like, does it exist now or is it still a little ways out?

Paul Warley (30:45.282)

It exists. It existed 10 years ago. We were involved in it. DoD, you can beam power. So it depends how you beam it, but you can beam power. Yep.

Wes Ashworth (30:59.438)

Perfect. And maybe this is a follow up to that. Thinking about, and let’s go specific, like thin film solar technology. How do you see that evolving over the next, let’s say going further 10, 20, 30 years further down the line? What do you think is possible?

Paul Warley (31:21.958)

Where I could see a definite use terrestrial or two areas, again, would be around cities or metropolitan areas that want to, you know, have fresh, you have fresher food, have that. It’s not done on mass farming. So, so to keep the family farm alive, I could see that. So that’s agrivoltaics and in Europe, agrivoltaics, that would be two areas, one area. The other two areas would be drones and that’s, but that’s primarily going to be DOD or government, insurance companies, that type of thing that flies over your house and all that. If they wanted to do it, they could keep the drone in the air longer. So that’s one. And then finally, I could see rooftop for us, but just because it’s so, it would be so much easier to install. So your labor costs go down. And then the other reason is, is with regular solar, you have to, in many roofs, not all, but a lot of roofs you have to re -engineer the roof so it can take the weight of the solar. And obviously with ours, you’re not gonna have that issue.

Wes Ashworth (32:56.426)

No, yeah. So you can dream for sure and think of a lot of exciting ways that it could be used and as technology evolves and the development happens. So it’s interesting to hear some of those just predictions, I guess. So for you, got a really broad topic outside of just solar. So just thinking about renewable energy as a whole. Any bold predictions, things that you think are on the way or will evolve over the next you know, five, 10, 20 years.

Paul Warley (33:29.424)

I think you’re gonna see nuclear and hydrogen play a bigger role, okay? Because you don’t have the grid issues with that. I mean, here, we’re having this interview in Atlanta. We just put up one of the largest nuclear plants in the world, if not the largest. I’m just not an expert on how big it is compared to others. And obviously, there’s the upfront cost, but after that, produces power at less than a, the cost is less than one cent. So I could see that and then smaller, real smaller devices that could produce power for AI processing centers, data processing centers and things like that, or power beaming, one of the two. And then hydrogen’s the same way. You can take water, turn it into hydrogen, and then you have a generator that runs off of hydrogen that produces the power.

Wes Ashworth (34:39.906)

Yeah, no, agree on both of those areas. Think hydrogen gets some pushback, but I think there are very specific use cases and applications where it makes a ton of sense and I think will be a piece of the puzzle in how we get there. Nuclear as well, you know, again, I think has some bad stigma around it or what have you, but you’re seeing a resurgence of that happening, seeing a lot of investment happening, certainly in nuclear right now as well too. So we can certainly see both of those areas.

For you, so we talked a little bit about the space debris and so I wanted to get into that. How do international policies like that, like the EU’s no space debris policy, how does that influence, I guess, your product development and strategy as a company?

Paul Warley (35:24.626)

I mean, it can only help. I don’t see how it could hurt us. Yeah, EU, I think it starts at the beginning of 2027. It may be 2026 now, I’m thinking, but it’s a couple of years out. There’s some rumblings inside of our Congress that they may want to do something like that? Is it going to necessarily say that you have to put a thin film product up? But what would establishment or fees and fines? And so then all of a sudden, you know, if, debris hits your panel and the panel breaks up and then you’re fined half a million dollars, it tends to, it would tend to drive you to a different product.

Wes Ashworth (36:26.914)

Yeah, which again, benefit of yours having less of an issue there. Thinking about other government incentives, other regulations, what role does that play in the adoption of your technology and just the further enhancement of the growth of your company?

Paul Warley (36:48.998)

Building a new plant or adding equipment would be the only way we’d have incentives if we’re primarily in space. However, a lot of the stuff in space is driven by different DOD departments in different countries.

So clearly if they want to have some roll -up capability, you can’t roll up panels. So regular solar panels. So that would definitely be it. And we would also have an advantage over some of the thin -film silicate product because we can roll up much tighter and faster.

Wes Ashworth (37:31.97)

Yeah, got it. Okay, cool. And as we’re getting closer to time here, I do want to ask sort of an open question and let you add anything that you want to share or things that were missed, but any other kind of just key messages, takeaways that you would want listeners to remember after the episode. So as hearing it, hearing your technology, your approach or thoughts, just key messages that they could take away.

Paul Warley (37:59.07)

We’re turning Ascent around, okay? I’ve done this with several other companies. It’s just the sales cycle is longer. Just hang in there with us and we should be fine. We’ve got a lot of opportunities in the horizon.

Wes Ashworth (38:21.112)

Yeah, I love it. And then last question I’ll ask and just around just legacy and things that if you look back at your career, your impact on renewable energy or the industry as a whole, I guess, what would you want your legacy to be? What are some things that you would want to leave behind?

Paul Warley (38:42.535)

That I turned around a battleship in a creek with this, with Ascent Solar No, I mean, this is a great company. We got great employees. I when I challenged them in May of last year, guys, in order for us to survive, we have to increase our power output. They responded. And with four and a half months later, we increased our efficiency and power output by, what, 70 % roughly. So we spent 17 years. And for the last seven or eight, we never really moved the needle on our power output or efficiency. And so I had to kind of pivot from the R &D mentality we had up here and pivoted to a business mentality.

Wes Ashworth (39:38.254)

Sure. Yeah, easier said than done for sure, pretty remarkable. I like that quote of turning a battleship in a creek. it. That encompasses all of it. No, cool. That’ll wrap up our conversation with Paul Warley CEO of Ascent Solar. But Paul, it’s really been fascinating to learn about Ascent Solar’s cutting edge thin film technology and the role it’s playing in both space and other innovative markets that are coming. Your vision for the future of renewable energy and dedication to advancing solar technology are truly inspiring. To our audience out there, thank you as always for tuning in to Green Giants, Titans of Renewable Energy. And if you found this episode insightful, be sure to subscribe, share it with your network, and join us again for more conversations with the trailblazers of the clean energy revolution.