Nanosolar Blog » Nanosolar Ships First Panels

After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped our first product — the Nanosolar Utility Panel™.

We are grateful to everyone who supported us through all these years and the many occasions where there appeared to be mile-high concrete walls in our path; the unusual intensity and creativity of our team deserves all the credit for achieving this major milestone today.

Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:

- the world’s first commercial solar panel based on a printed solar cell;

- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a back-contact;

- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first company capable of profitably selling solar panels for as little as $.99/Watt;

- the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;

- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.

Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.
Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.
Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

Update 12/21: eBay cancelled our auction — due to its charitable angle! Our eBay auction started at 99 cents and quickly reached more than $13,000.00, with the highest bid at $70,000. We declared that the proceeds would be used for charitable purpose. We regret that without warning eBay today decided to delete our auction due to the promised charitable use of the proceeds. Our Director of Legal spent much of the afternoon on the phone with eBay trying to reinstate the auction — but they are not flexible. Upon review we decided this isn’t a battle we care to fight more than an afternoon, so it’s back to building cells and panels for us. In other words, Panel #2 will stay at Nanosolar for now (no auction); thank you to everyone for participating in our auction; and most importantly: HAPPY HOLIDAYS.