Miasole; Layoffs Raise Questions About Technology

News of Miasole layoffs has raised questions about the company’s manufacturing technology and reminded investors about the difficulty of producing thin films.

“Evidently, they’ve run into some technical difficulties that preclude production,” said Paul Maycock, president of solar-electric consulting and research firm Photovoltaic Energy Systems. “It’s very difficult to make thin film.”
The layoffs are “a testament to how careful you need to be about some of the choices in process technology,” he said.

Thin-film solar technologies use little or no silicon, a potential advantage in today’s worldwide shortage of solar-grade silicon. Instead of slicing wafers of silicon crystals to make solar cells, thin-film companies coat plastics, glass or other substrates with thin films of material that convert sunlight into electricity.

Advocates say such technologies could dramatically reduce the cost of solar power. But in spite of decades of research, thin films had proven difficult to produce cost-effectively.

Greentech Media