Abu Dhabi Investing $2 billion in Thin-Film Solar

This past Wednesday, the oil-rich state of Abu Dhabi announced a $2 billion investment in a thin-film solar venture. Under the company of Masdar PV, this represents the single largest ever investment in solar technology. Abu Dhabi, which has a $15 billion fund fueled by oil profits, sees this investment as another step toward their ultimate goal of becoming a green technology powerhouse and cut their carbon footprint.

Masdar is already known to green enthusiasts for their plans to build Masdar City, a zero carbon, zero waste metropolis.

Masdar is planning on using the investment cash to build two manufacturing facilities, one in Germany and one in Abu Dhabi. The former is expected to be up and running by the third quarter of 2009, while the domestic plant should be operational by 2014. The two plants combined will yield over 200 megawatts of electricity. After several days of speculation, it was announced that the manufacturing equipment will be provided by computer-chip maker Applied Materials.

Masdar has big expectations from this project and hopes to eventually expand their thin-film solar operations to the US and Asian markets.

Thin-film is a solar technology that builds extremely thin solar cells that can be printed onto other building materials so that it can easily be integrated onto a building. The technology is known to be less efficient at converting solar rays into electricity than conventional PV cells, but thin-film is much cheaper to produce since it uses far less silicon.

This latest investment by Abu Dhabi helps diversify their solar power portfolio, which already includes solar thermal start up companies, which have received a lot of attention lately thanks to investment from large companies, including Google.

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