20 Green Companies Set to Change the World

Plenty Magazine has predicted the next green companies set to change the world. The Plenty 20 includes members of the Fortune 500 whose initiatives are changing big business’s relationship with the environment as well as smaller start-up companies.

Nanosolar earned the top spot with its efforts to make solar power as affordable as electricity produced by coal and natural gas.

Its thin film technology involves “printing” a microscopic layer of solar cells onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil. The resulting panels are lighter, cheaper, and as efficient as traditional solar panels, but they require no silicon, short supplies of which have caused many solar companies to stumble, according to Plenty. And Nanosolar is producing the cells at $1 per watt, or one-tenth of the cost of traditional cells.

The rest of the Plenty 20: