Xunlight Unveils New Mile Long Roll-Up Solar Cell Panels

Xunlight, a thin-film silicon solar development company in Toledo Ohio, has successfully demonstrated its roll-up solar panel manufacturing technique. The "roll-to-roll" manufacturing process forms thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells on ultra thin sheets of stainless steel, so thin that you can roll it up.

The manufacturing process that Xunlight has developed allows for them to produce solar panels on rolls three feet wide and up to one mile long. The long stainless steel web is guided through a series of vacuum chambers for the deposition of  nine semiconductor layers using a plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition process,  and back-reflector and top electrode layers using a sputtering process. The combined  thickness of the layers for the triple-junction solar cell is approximately one hundredth of the thickness of a typical sheet of paper. Therefore, only a small amount of silicon is used.

"This is a significant milestone for us," said Dr. Xunming Deng, President and CEO of the Company. "Everyone at Xunlight, particularly those in the design, engineering, construction and production teams, have worked extremely hard to make this possible. We are very proud of our talented and hardworking team."

Traditional solar panels use crystalline cells but Xunlight's process uses Amorphous silicon thin-film solar cells which are much cheaper but come with a big downside, their not very efficient. To help make them more efficient Xunlight made the triple-junction cells which uses three different materials to help capture energy from light.

The Xunlight solar panels are about 8% efficient as opposed to some of the existing crystalline silicon based solar panels on the market today which achieve nearly 20% efficiency.

While the new roll-up solar panels aren't the most efficient solar cells we've seen, they are certainly cheaper and having the flexibility will make them especially marketable.

I'm still most interesting in the new spray-on solar panels that we wrote about a few months back. Those panels are suppose to hit the market shortly after Xunlight comes out with the roll-up panels.

Xunlight expects to have commercial availability of its products in 2010. You can find more information at Xunlight.com