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Sky Station International
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United Solar and Sky Station
International Announce New Space PV Joint Venture Troy, Michigan and Washington, D.C., April 23, 1998 - - United Solar Systems Corp. ("United Solar") and Sky Station International, Inc. ("Sky Station") announced today the formation of a new joint venture, Sky Solar, L.L.C., to manufacture photovoltaic ("PV") products for stratospheric platforms and space satellites. The venture is owned 60% by United Solar and 40% by Sky Station. United Solar's contribution to the venture is its proprietary PV technology. Sky Station is providing funding to optimize United Solar's technology for stratospheric and space ("strato-space") applications and for construction of a dedicated strato-space PV production line. The global revolution in telecommunications and information systems requires the launching of hundreds of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites and high altitude/stratospheric platforms in the next decade. "To accomplish this, industry will require a radical reduction in the cost and weight of space PV power systems," said Stanford R. Ovshinsky, Chief Executive Officer of United Solar and the new joint venture. "With our PV technology, Sky Station has the enabling technology that it needs for this exciting new frontier of telecommunications." Sky Station has developed technology that enables the deployment of a network of stationary stratospheric airships at 70,000 feet (21 km) above the world's major cities to provide broadband telecommunications services. "The stratospheric infrastructure we are building will offer access to high-speed Internet services and telephone and videophone services at lower prices than are available today or projected for the future," said Sky Station™ President, Alexander P. Haig. "Sky Solar PV technology meets our cost and weight requirements and provides considerable benefit to space based delivery systems as well." The projected market for space PV systems in the next decade is in the hundreds of megawatts. Each LEO requires 5-15 kilowatts of PV modules and each stratospheric platform requires approximately a megawatt. Sky Solar will capture a significant part of this market given that Sky Station will be the single largest consumer of PV modules in the market place. Sky Solar's new strato-space PV module will be a modification of the PV product of United Solar, a joint venture formed in 1990 between Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. ("ECD") (NASDAQ National Market: ENER) and Canon, Inc. United Solar uses proprietary roll-to-roll technology and materials for the production of thin film amorphous silicon alloy solar cells on stainless steel for a variety of terrestrial uses. ECD designs and builds the proprietary roll-to-roll production equipment utilized by United Solar. The solar cell is radiation hard, performs well in high temperatures and has already demonstrated high performance under space illumination conditions. United Solar is the world leader in amorphous silicon alloy PV, holding all the records for high efficiency cells and modules. United Solar produces a wide variety of specialty products, and a new line of award winning PV shingles and metal roofing for building integrated PV. Sky Station, a Washington, D.C. based emerging provider of low-cost broadband Internet capacity and other telecommunications services via stratospheric platforms, recently announced the industrial team that will build the proprietary platforms. That team includes Aerospatiale SNI of France, Dornier Satellitensysteme GmbH in Germany - a corporate unit of Daimler-Benz Aerospace, Thomson-CSF of France, Alenia Spazio/Finmeccanica of Italy, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, COMSAT Laboratories of Maryland and Stanford Telecom of California. For further information please contact: Stanford R. Ovshinsky Alexander P. Haig Artemis Scantalides, Manager, Corporate Communications
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