ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Oct 24 - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Rosalie Rayburn Albuquerque Journal, N.M.

A Defense Department grant is helping put New Mexico in the forefront of the race to create a low-cost, lightweight and flexible solar power source.

Researchers at New Mexico State University, with engineering support from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., have created a plastic made from a blend of polymers and carbon molecules that can convert sunlight into electric charges with an efficiency of 5.2 percent.

NMSU physicist Seamus Curran made the announcement at a nanotechnologies workshop in Santa Fe earlier this month.

The NMSU-Wake Forest achievement puts them ahead of the 4.4 percent efficiency level recently announced by a research team from UCLA. Late last year, the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, said it had achieved a power conversion efficiency of 3.4 percent.

The NMSU-Wake Forest collaboration shared a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop coating materials that would reduce energy needs and delay deterioration in military aircraft.

In a phone interview later from Las Cruces, Curran characterized the achievement as a breakthrough in the race to find a solar generating alternative to photovoltaic (PV) panels that use costly, and increasingly hard to get, silicon.

At present, PV panels using silicon can produce electricity from sunlight with an efficiency level between 12 and 13 percent, Curran said. His team hopes to boost the efficiency of the polymer-carbon plastic blend to 10 percent within five years.

A plastic-based solar generating material would be cheaper to produce, lighter and less fragile than PV panels manufactured with silicon. It could also be bent to fit on shaped surfaces, such as car roofs, or even sprayed on, Curran said.

Solar PV panels, which are mostly used to produce electricity for residential use, have to be mounted on racks.

Once a plastic solar generating material can produce electricity as efficiently as PV panels, it could be cost-competitive as a power generator with natural gas.

"The applications are phenomenal," Curran said, though he cautioned that commercial development of a solar plastic material will eventually depend on market forces.

Earlier this month, a New Mexico startup company approached NMSU about negotiating to license the technology for commercial development, said Kevin Boberg, CEO of Arrowhead Center, a corporation created by NMSU to commercialize technology developed at the university.