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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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.
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.
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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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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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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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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