Lighting Up the $1 Trillion Power Market

There's a missile-bunker vibe you get when walking into Solaicx, a Silicon Valley startup that manufactures the silicon wafers that are the building blocks of solar panels. ... In fact, before Solaicx even flipped the switch on its first silicon crystal grower, GE promised to buy every wafer the four-year-old company can crank out. Solaicx is one of dozens of Silicon Valley firms driving a sizzling $11 billion worldwide market in solar energy, ... Solar is not the only alternative-energy source generating interest in the Valley: Biofuels, fuel cells, and hydrogen power are all attracting their fair share of investment. But solar energy has just the sort of oversize potential that the titans of tech saw in computing: a free and practically inexhaustible power source that rises every day.