News No.14

Solar-Tectic LLC is pleased to report that ‘Textured (111) crystalline silicon thin film growth on flexible glass by e-beam evaporation’ has been accepted for publication by Materials Letters. The paper is available for viewing at Science Direct.  MIT’s recent report, “the future of solar”, says the following: “Like commercial thin-film technologies, thin-film c-Si PV uses 10-50 times less material than wafer based c-Si PV, and may enable lightweight and flexible modules, and uses high-throughput processing… As noted in chapter 2, some emerging thin-film technologies may be able to achieve much lower BOS requirements than silicon, perhaps by employing lightweight  and/or flexible modules with thin absorber layers”. (chapter 2, and chapter 6, p.125)  The flexible glass thin-film silicon technology reported in this paper thus not only is promising for improved cell efficiency and cost, but also BOS costs!