Photowatt started life in Caen in 1979, on a site once occupied by Philips. The company has been located in Bourgoin since 1992. A family firm, Photowatt was bought out in 1997 by Canada's Automation Tooling Systems (ATS), which employs a total of 4,000 people at 25 locations worldwide.

The Photowatt facility consists of a production unit of photovoltaics plates, cells and modules - furnace processing of the raw material, silicon, manufacture of cells, and clean room assembly of solar panels - a maintenance unit, and an R&D centre. Between 1992 and 2007 the workforce at Photowatt rose from 50 to 600 people. Export sales, particularly in Germany, account for 98% of sales. Photowatt is France's top manufacturer. Since 1998 €7m has been invested in industrial equipment at the Bourgoin facility to keep pace with a market enjoying 25% annual growth. To cater for strong demand abroad Photowatt production capacity has increased from 45 Megawatts at the end of 2006, to 60 Megawattsin 2007, very soon reaching 100 Megawatts.

Photowatt interacts with CNRS , Grenoble university research laboratories focussing on polycrystalline silicon, and CEA-Liten . The Reducop 2 project (certified by the Tenerrdis competitiveness cluster) is being jointly developed by Photowatt, CEA-Grenoble and CNRS with the aim of cutting fabrication costs by 25% for all the necessary parts and boosting the conversion efficiency of embedded PV cells by 17%.

PV Alliance is the result of a collaboration between two firms, Photowatt and EDF Energies Renouvelables, and CEA . The company, created at the end of 2007, aims to develop more efficient PV cells. Its strategy focuses on two key priorities: production of solar cells using silicon obtained with the Photosil
process as well as nanotechnologies and the use of microtechnologies tools to develop a new generation of high-efficiency cells. In order to reach these objectives, PV Alliance relies on the Photowatt industrial site in Bourgoin-Jallieu and on the strong technological competencies of CEA Grenoble and Minatec , with the support of the French government, the Isère department council and the Rhône- Alpes region.

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