Making Solar Energy Economically Viable
Most people believe that it would take rich government subsidies to make solar energy cost-competitive with energy derived from fossil fuels. They believe it’s going to be that way for many years to come.
We think they’ll be proven wrong.
That’s because we’ve developed remarkable new technologies that can completely change the way solar cells are manufactured.
We’re using a proprietary laser technology to create the Natcore Foil Cell™, the first laser-processed, all-low-temperature solar cell using an aluminum foil laminate to realize an all-back-contact system.
In doing so, we’ve replaced high-cost silver with low-cost aluminum.
We’re also using black silicon technology to optimize low solar cell reflectance. We’ve eliminated the traditional thermal vacuum processes such as CVD and PECVD for making anti-reflective coatings, and we’ve eliminated the use of gold as a catalyst in etching silicon wafers.
The solar cell of tomorrow is already in our laboratory today. We are engineering a cell of higher quality and higher efficiency. It will be cleaner and less expensive than conventional solar cells.
Natcore Foil Cell™
The Natcore Foil Cell™ combines a revolutionary laser process with a novel metallization strategy, enabling high efficiency cell architectures at low cost. The key feature: metallization of the cell by direct attachment of a bilayer aluminum foil laminate. The concept simplifies the fabrication of several silicon based, all-back contact cell architectures.
The all-back-contact solar cell is generally recognized as a very efficient structure. Indeed, a cell of this type holds the world record for silicon cell efficiency at 25.6%.
However, complicated and expensive production requirements have always been a limitation to producing cost-effective all-back-contact cells.
The Natcore Foil Cell™ has key advantages that overcome these limitations:
- The laminate processing and cell attachment merges multiple steps into one, is performed in ambient fab conditions, occupies a small fab footprint and is low in capital cost
- All contact metal is aluminum foil. A significant cost savings is derived by eliminating silver metallization materials. Further cost and simplicity originate from leveraging the high volume processes that already exist worldwide for forming and processing aluminum foils and laminates.
- All-back-contact cells tend to have very low cell-to-module (CTM) losses, due in large part to the ability to couple them with very conductive module backplanes and minimize front encapsulant thickness. The Natcore Foil Cell is compatible with 156 mm x 156 mm wafer sizes.
The Natcore Foil Cell and all related technologies and inventions are protected by patent applications.
