Canadian solar cell manufacturing facility failure

Tom's visit ~10 years prior to a quarter-billion-dollar Canadian government solar facility that tanked.

I went up to a place in Canada about ten years ago that was a solar cell manufacturing facility. The Canadian government had plowed a quarter billion dollars into this place — huge manufacturing facility for solar cells — and they tanked. If you really look at the economics of solar cells, you can't quite get there by the old way: make a huge ingot — doesn't have to be a single crystal but even a great large grain polycrystal — and then cut it with diamond saws. It's just too much saw cutting. That's why Professor Sachs started this company with edge-defined film growth, so you'd grow it as a thin sheet and you don't have to saw cut it.