Parade executives approached Donnelly a couple of years ago, and the 40-foot-long balloon, made from urethane-coated nylon, has been in process ever since.
Its "nose" is a 2-inch-long glass cylinder coated on the inside with a concoction of glowing chemicals like those found in the belly of a lightning bug.
At a lunch at One Market in San Francisco, Chris Gronet, a Solyndra founder and then-chief executive, pulled from a case a long cylindrical tube that was coated in thin-film solar cells.