U.S. President George Bush visited United Solar Ovonic on Monday to help promote the renewable-energy plan he introduced in his State of the Union address.

The visit to the Auburn Hills, Michigan, company is part of a two-day trip that also will include a stop at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. The stop reflected a new interest in solar energy from an administration well known for its oil-company ties.

Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said the visit gave the president a first-hand view of the solar industry. “We cannot drill our way out of this energy crisis, but we can manufacture and innovate our way out,” he said. “Solar energy is a rock-solid technology that consumers are installing today to address the current energy crunch.”

The visit comes less than three weeks after the president said in his State of the Union address that the United Stateswas “addicted” to oil and introduced an initiative to increase clean-energy research by $10 billion (see Clean Energy Earns Bush’s Nod).

While the event boosted the solar industry as a whole, a small group of companies has even more reason to rejoice. The president picked a company that makes a thin-film solar technology—part of a group of solar technologies that has floundered for decades.

Presidential support is only one of several recent signs that the technology could finally be finding its feet. Last week, organic thin-film company Konarka announced it raised $20 million in venture capital funding (see Konarka Raises $20M in Funds). Thin-film startups Miasolé, Nanosolar, and HelioVolt also raised venture capital funding last year (see Energy Innovations Gets Cash).

Earlier this month, energy giant Royal Dutch Shell sold its 80-megawatt-per-year crystalline silicon solar business to SolarWorld, a solar firm based in Bonn, Germany, and said it would focus on its thin-film solar technology.

In December, Honda Motor became the first car manufacturer to enter the solar business, announcing plans to begin mass-producing thin-film cells by 2007.

Small, but Growing

Crystalline photovoltaic (PV) technologies are the kings of the solar world, with 93 percent of the market, according to Paula Mints, an associate director at Navigant Consulting. But they are heavily based on expensive silicon.

The attraction of thin films is that they use much less silicon—only a thin film—or, in some cases, none at all, instead opting for materials like cadmium telluride (CdTe), or copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS).

Still, thin films make up only 7 percent, or 90.2 megawatts, of the market; the same percentage as in 2004, Ms. Mints said.

She forecasts that thin films will grow to 8 percent of the burgeoning solar market in 2006, while Michael Rogol, an analyst for CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, expects thin films to jump to more than 10 percent of a 2-gigawatt, $16-billion solar market this year.

Why the sudden pickup? Market conditions, including high energy prices and government subsidies, have created a boom in solar demand at the same time as a shortage of polysilicon—the high grade of silicon used for solar PV—has given thin films an extra advantage.

Polysilicon is too scarce to meet all the demand—its price has risen by two-thirds since 2003—and thin films are available after crystalline PV is sold out.

The silicon shortage is only expected to last about three years, but B.J. Stanbery, CEO of HelioVolt, said the window of opportunity will give thin-film manufacturers the chance to develop their technology and build their capacity so they can undersell crystalline by the time the shortage ends.

Not everyone believes that will happen, however. Mr. Rogol expects thin-film market share to drop after the polysilicon shortage is over, to about 8 percent in 2010.

Thin films have a history of missed promises, he said. While early thin films theoretically had lower cost structures than crystalline silicon, they have historically proven costly or difficult to manufacture on a large scale, said Mr. Rogol.

They also had low efficiencies and degraded quickly, said Ron Pernick, a principal at research firm and consultancy Clean Edge. But the companies believe new materials and manufacturing technologies could finally launch thin films into viability.

Breakthroughs Bring Hope

New materials, some of them nanotech-based, have turned out cells that are more efficient and longer-lasting than their predecessors. Many have the same life spans as crystalline, but the average efficiencies are still lower than that of crystalline.

For example, a typical module of amorphous silicon—the type of material used by United Solar Ovonic—gets only 5 to 7 percent efficiency, compared with 10 to 14 percent efficiency for crystalline modules, according to the New Energy Fund.

But while the average efficiencies are still lower than that of crystalline, the most efficient of them is comparable to average crystalline cells. And Mr. Pernick noted they don’t have to be as efficient as crystalline if they cost less.

Startups have begun applying proven manufacturing processes from other high-tech areas such as disk drives, making it more likely that they will be able to scale up and lower costs, he said.

DayStar is applying a glass pressing technology used in flat-screen TVs, for instance. Miasolé uses the “sputtering” manufacturing process used to make architectural glass and thin-film disk drives. And Konarka and HelioVolt are using nanotechnology “printing” processes.

All these new approaches have given many in the solar industry hope that a resurgence of thin films could be on the way.

“Many thin-film technologies have been in lab development for years, and are ready to come out of the labs,” Mr. Pernick said. “There are reasons for a lot of excitement. You would need a crystal ball to know if it’s going to be in two years or five years, but certainly these technologies are on the pathway to success.”