Meet Stan Ovshinsky, the Energy Genius

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Stan Ovshinsky, founder of ECD Ovonics. ECD OVONICS

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October/November 2006 Issue #218

By Tim Kridel

If you’ve used a rechargeable battery, driven a hybrid vehicle or put solar panels on your roof, you’re benefiting from the work of Stanford Ovshinsky. But unless you’re an energy aficionado or you work in the automotive industry, chances are you’ve never heard of him.

President George W. Bush probably hadn’t, either, until he toured Ovshinsky’s solar company, United Solar Ovonic (Uni-Solar), in February 2006. “This is real,” Bush said afterward, as if he’d had an epiphany about solar energy’s potential. If he did, he wouldn’t have been the first: People who’ve known Ovshinsky for decades say that he has a knack for convincing skeptics about the true potential of renewable energy.

Though Ovshinsky now holds well over 300 patents, his most notable inventions include thin-film photovoltaic (PV) solar panels and PV production machines, the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery, and solid hydrogen fuel storage to safely store hydrogen in vehicles — all of which work together in his renewable energy plan, the hydrogen loop.

The hydrogen loop is designed to convert our carbon-based economy into a hydrogen-based one, using renewable sources such as the sun — thereby reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and eliminating their global-warming causing emissions. In a shift to a hydrogen-based economy, Ovshinsky sees not only the end to conflict over the world’s dwindling oil supplies, but also economic growth from new industries with higher value jobs.

Show, Don’t Tell

“Stan can be a great salesman, but he always says: ‘I’m not going to tell you about it, I’m just going to show you,’” says solar expert Steve Heckeroth, director of building integrated photovoltaic products for ECD (Energy Conversion Devices) Ovonics, the parent company of Uni-Solar.

To make his point, Ovshinsky carries with him a panel of thin-film PV, which can be used to power everything from homes and factories to space satellites. Thin-film PV is lighter, more flexible, more durable, more efficient in low light and less expensive than previous solar-electric panel technologies.

“He connects that panel to a radio,” Heckeroth says. “He can go out on a rainy day and put the panel in ambient light, and the radio will come on.” By comparison, other PV technologies produce less power, or none at all, if shade covers even a portion of the panels. Because of their varied atomic structure, ECD’s solar cells capture a wider range of frequencies from the light spectrum, thereby producing more energy than traditional crystalline silicon solar panels.

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