Noribachi gives solar products an appearance worth envying - Phoenix Business Journal:

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Rather, the school will retrofit it’s nearly 100 outdoor lighr poleswith light-emitting diodes that are solar-powered and wired with smarft technology to shut on and off automatically. In addition, the school will decorate its campu s with sculptures made by internationally acclaimed Santa Fe artist Tom Joyce that also includde photovoltaic LED technology tolight walkways, building entrances and otherf areas.
The new products were developedd byNoribachi LLC, an Albuquerque venturew accelerator established in 2007 to adapt solar and othefr clean technology to every day consumer products, said Andreqw Wooden, head of the Bosque School and a membefr of Noribachi’s board of advisors. “Noribachi is inventing technologiees that are not only usefukl to the school but that can be studied by our studentx as part of our efforts to teach environmental sciencew andenergy conservation,” Wooden said. “The solar-powere d LED lighting uses less than 10 percent of the energg that our currentlighting consumes, and it’s just a simples retrofit for what we already have.
The sculpturex also demonstrate how clean energy can beaestheticallg pleasing.” Finding new, every day applicationws for existing clean technologies like PV while makint products that are artistic, accessible and useful to consumersd are the central goals of Noribachi, said company co-foundet Rhonda Dibachi. “We’re using solar technology in ways other than just PV sittingy on a roof and looking ugly,” Dibachi said. “We’re looking at smallet and more distributed Dibachi said solar power is in its much the way computer processing technology was fourdecades ago.
And, like the computere industry, solar and other cleajn technologies will become more affordable and much more widely used when innovatords make simple products available on amass scale. “It’x about the ‘democratization’ of solar Dibachi said. “Information technology started big andbecam distributed, and we thinj clean tech is in that same stage.” Dibachki founded the company with her husband, Farzafd Dibachi. Both are engineers from the Silicon Valley withstartup experience. They co-founded Niku Corp., an information technolog y firm in California that went public in 2000 and was acquire byin 2003.
Farzad also helped found Diba a software firm sold toin 1997. They movefd to New Mexico in 2006 and formed Noribachi to tap the emerging market for innovativs solarand clean-tech products. The companyt now has about a dozen patents in the Dibachi said. “Solar technology is so new that there’se a huge amount of spacwe forpatented innovation,” she “For us, it’s like picking up Noribachi employs 12 people at a 20,000-square-foot facilitu in north Albuquerque to develop new technologh and conduct light assembly.
It spins new producte out throughstartup companies, such as the Santa Fe firm Qnuru (pronounceed kuh-NO-roo) that is designing and marketing the PV-LEr sculptures the Bosque School plans to buy. which comes from the Swahili word for light combined with the lettert Qfor quality, opened on Aprikl 7 with five employees and has received $100,009 in orders for its lighting sculptures, said artist Tom “With Qnuru, we’re working on the creative edge of marrying technology, science and Joyce said. “It brings all threee together in a seamless way to offed a solarlighting solution.
” Noribachi is now forming an Albuquerque-base solar engineering services and solar retrofitting firm. It also launchede California-based Green By Design, a Web site for environmentallu aware consumers thatoffersd information, education and ratings for green Dibachi said the company is mostly self-funded, but it has 10 investorw as limited partners in Noribachi’se venture acceleration fund, which finances research and developmenr and provides capital for startups. Joe dean of the ’s Schoolp of Engineering and a memberof Noribachi’ss advisory board, said the company is fillin a market niche.
“They’re making solar power more accessiblr and usable by targeting consumer applications,” Cecchi said. “I don’t know if anybody else is doinb that.”