Nanosolar is pioneering the “Third Wave” of Solar Power:

• The First Wave started with the introduction of silicon-wafer based solar cells over three decades ago.  While ground-breaking, it is visible until today that this technology came out of a (research and market) environment with a lot of fascination for spearhead efficiencies and little regard for cost and the ratio between cost and efficiency.

  Despite continued incremental improvements, silicon-wafer based cells are fundamentally limited by high materials cost and poor capital efficiency. Because silicon wafers do not absorb light very strongly, silicon cells intrinsically require large amounts of semiconductor material. And because wafers are fragile, their handling is intricate and limits achievable process throughput, with the result being poor cost efficiency.
  
  

• The Second Wave came about a decade ago with the arrival of the first commercial thin-film solar cells.  This established that new non-silicon semiconductor materials could dramatically reduce the materials cost of solar cells, with the absorber of such cells being two orders of magnitude thinner than that of silicon wafer cells. 

  However, it turned out that this was not enough to make a fundamental difference in the cost efficiency of solar panels overall: the challenge resided in yield and throughput limits of vacuum based thin-film deposition techniques, which resulted in high process cost.  As a result, none of the many thin-film efforts based on vacuum deposition was ever able to produce products more than only marginally less expensive than ever-improving silicon cells.
  
  

• The Third Wave of Solar Power, led by Nanosolar, brings together several fundamental technology innovations that build on the unmet potential of the Second Wave while more than addressing its limitations.  The result of these patented and patent-pending innovations is a dramatic improvement in the cost-efficiency, yield, and throughput of the production of thin-film solar cells.  

  What was required to accomplish this was an entire array of fundamental process-technology innovations in no less than seven areas of innovation.