By Eric Wolff, North County Times, Escondido, Calif.

June 18--Here's a new kind of recycling: GeckoLogic USA in Vista will soon offer factory-rejected, then refurbished, solar panels to its residential and commercial solar customers, the company said.

Solar technology is changing so fast, manufacturers must constantly retune their machinery. Every new tweak leads to a number of defective panels that can't be sold. In 2008, a Norwegian company, Innotech Solar ASA, figured out a way to fix the panels with lasers.

GeckoLogic volunteered to sell the Innotech panels in the United States, but its potential customers were skeptical. GeckoLogic turned to a UC San Diego engineering undergraduate to prove the panels work as advertised. The product worked better than hoped.

"We use only high-end stuff," said Georg Eversheim, managing director for GeckoLogic USA. "Only high-end stuff is worth it for recycling. It's the best of the best, refurbished, laser-fixed. Our carbon footprint is way down. It's greener than green."

Solar demand worldwide has been skyrocketing, up 73 percent in 2010, according to BP's Statistical Review of World Energy. That drove a huge investment in solar power research that has created a nonstop stream of improvements to solar cells. Manufacturers try to stay ahead of the market by implementing the latest research, but it creates quality control problems.

"A wafer manufacturer comes with a new thickness, and everyone behind on the value chain has to fix their machines," said Robert Haendel, chief sales officer for Innotech. "It creates a high percentage of breakage."

Indeed, Haendel said between 3 and 5 percent of all solar panels are sufficiently defective that the factories can't sell them. The manufacturers would either try to recycle the raw materials or simply throw them away, Haendel said.

Innotech saw a business opportunity and developed ways to fix the panels, making use of what had before been waste.

When part of the silicon on a solar cell is broken, workers cut around the broken area and get some usable silicon out of the piece, and produce half-cells and quarter-cells that can be cobbled into full panels. When a circuit in the cell creates a short, they use a laser to inlay a new circuit that bypasses the broken area.

Innotech started producing the panels in Holland for sale in Europe, but it wanted to bring the panels to the United States, which is how it eventually connected with GeckoLogic USA, Haendel said.

"GeckoLogic was reacting fast for us," Haendel said.

Eversheim started selling the panels in the United States, but some companies worried that lab testing under ideal conditions didn't prove the panels' worth. Eversheim brought the panels to UCSD to get a real-world test.

That's where UCSD engineering student Richard Driscoll took up the project.

Driscoll was nearly done last winter with his degree in mechanical engineering, but he had stayed an extra two quarters so he could add a minor in business. He volunteered to work with Jan Kleissl, a professor who offered him the chance to evaluate the panels, Driscoll said.

He spent months setting up a test apparatus that could assess how efficiently the panels converted sun energy to electricity, and how well they handled heat (solar panels lose efficiency at high temperatures). Then he mounted them on the roof of Rimac Arena, the university's gym.

"They (the panels) performed slightly better than the standard values that were expected from the lab testing. (Those were) my findings, which was really promising," Driscoll said.

The test was so successful that Innotech shipped a container of 130 kilowatts' worth of the panels to California for GeckoLogic to sell, and Haendel is looking to establish a more permanent sales base in the United States, either in California or Colorado, Haendel said.

"For U.S., we are kind of still in business development phase," Haendel said. "We know it's going to be a good market; it's a product that fits very well for U.S. Let's just do it. Let's get started."

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