SoloPower makes thin-film solar cells but rather than package them into a rigid panel, its solar collectors are flexible strips.
IBM's approach is based on a process developed by IBM Research to crank out so-called thin-film solar cells based on copper, indium, gallium and selenide.
Nanosolar, furthermore, a maker of thin-film solar cells, has a project in Spain that applies nano-science that will provide 16, 500 megawatt hours of electricity each year.
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The idea behind thin-film solar cells, however, is to work with flexible films, slashing costs while creating solar cells that can be wrapped around walls or even incorporated into tinted windows.
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.
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That is not great compared with the 20% and more achieved by a silicon-based solar cell, the 40% managed by a solar-thermal turbine, or even the 18-20% of one of the new generation of cheap and cheerful thin-film solar cells.
In his 50-year career, Ovshinsky received more than 400 patents in the U.S. and more than 800 foreign patents covering a range of technologies, including nickel-metal hydride batteries, rewritable CDs, DVD optical discs, flat-screen liquid crystal displays, hydrogen fuel cells, thin-film solar cells and others.
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While less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than conventional photovoltaic cells, the promise of thin-film solar was that it could be manufactured much cheaper as cells are printed on glass or long rolls of thin metal.
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The panels are various new thin-film technologies that Chevron thinks could cost less than current thin film technologies or traditional crystalline silicon solar cells.
Solyndra, which was founded in 2005, invented a type of cylindrical solar module that was printed with thin-film photovoltaic cells that used little of the then-expensive polysilicon that forms the heart of conventional solar modules.
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Nanosolar is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have attracted billions of dollars in venture capital to develop a thin-film technology called copper indium gallium selenide, or CIGS. Such solar cells use little expensive silicon, the main ingredient of conventional photovoltaic cells.
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It has been concluded therefore that in the future less than 1% of solar pv will be in the form of CIGS thin-film cells.
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