To compete in both the U.S. and Chinese markets, says Ken Zweibel, director of the George Washington Solar Institute, the company will need to increase the efficiency of the solar cells that can be made using its equipment. “Amorphous silicon has a relatively low cost, but its efficiency is the lowest of all the thin-film solar cells,” says Zweibel. Cells made of cadmium telluride that are sold by U.S. thin-film company First Solar have an efficiency of around 11 percent. The amorphous-silicon solar cells made on Applied Materials’s equipment are at just over 8 percent. “The 3 percent difference in efficiency is a 30 percent difference in terms of overall cost,” Zweibel notes.

Pinto says research at the Xi’an center will focus on products suited to the way that country’s population is concentrated, in cities with tall buildings. “Cities in China don’t have very much rooftop” on which to place solar cells, says Pinto. The company plans to develop technologies such as electrochromic windows, which save heating and cooling costs by changing color with the weather. Solar cells embedded in windows might act both as a shade and an energy source. The company is also researching LED lighting and plans to work on thin-film batteries.

The world’s biggest supplier of solar-manufacturing equipment has opened a research and development center in China, and its chief technology officer will relocate from Silicon Valley to that country next month. Applied Materials, founded in 1967 as a semiconductor company, has manufactured in China for 25 years, but is expanding its presence to be closer to its customers and develop products suited to the country’s urban population.

“We’re doing R&D in China because they’re becoming a big market whose needs are different from those in the U.S.,” says Mark Pinto, Applied Materials’s CTO. Going forward, he says, “energy will become the biggest business for the company,” and China, not the U.S., “will be the biggest solar market in the world.”

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