Photo voltaic panels are nearly in every single place. There’s a great likelihood one in every of your neighbors has them on their roof, as does the large field retailer down the road. As you drive there, you would possibly see a discipline of them posted up alongside the street. With that sort of ubiquity, you’d be forgiven when you thought there wasn’t room for enchancment.
Venkatesan Murali wish to show you fallacious.
Murali, founder and CTO of Merlin Photo voltaic, has been working a special approach on photo voltaic for almost a decade. He based the corporate in 2016, after Solyndra’s spectacular implosion in 2011 and as Chinese language producers had been driving panels down a vertiginous value curve. However Murali remained fixated, although he did take a lesson from the debacle.
“Don’t scare the heck out of individuals with one thing new,” he advised TechCrunch. “No new molecules, no new physics.”
As a substitute, Merlin Photo voltaic turned to an present and broadly used photo voltaic know-how, monocrystalline silicon. Photo voltaic cells made with the stuff are cheap however fragile; to forestall fractures, corporations normally sandwich monocrystalline silicon inside two panels of glass bordered by a steel body. That makes panels heavy, and it limits the place they are often put in.
Murali wished versatile photo voltaic panels, however utilizing monocrystalline silicon posed a problem. “The whole lot crystalline will ultimately crack,” Murali mentioned. “Can we be sure that each electron will discover its approach, even when a bullet went by way of?”
To reply that, the corporate modified the best way cells are related inside a panel. Merlin beefed up the variety of connections back and front and, between cells, made the interconnects springy so they may bounce again after being bent.
“Abruptly, we had a product that was not solely proof against cracking, however electrically resilient to cracking,” he mentioned.
Merlin’s panels are considerably lighter than a typical glass panel, and their versatile nature modifications how and the place they are often put in. The panels include an adhesive on the pack, to allow them to be connected to surfaces identical to a baby’s sticker. The flexible construction can comply with the contours of various surfaces, permitting them to mount flush atop the roof of an Winnebago Airstream trailer, for instance.
Merlin says its panels can deal with partial shading higher than conventional panels. In a standard panel, as soon as one thing like a leaf shades a nook of the cell, energy manufacturing drops off dramatically. Merlin’s internet of connections permits extra energy to route across the shaded cell.
The added flexibility, gentle weight, and skill to deal with shading has made Merlin’s panels a favourite amongst leisure autos house owners. The corporate has additionally bought panels to corporations like Perdue, Daimler, and Ryder to be used on their vans, permitting them to cut back idling or using fossil fuels to energy onboard fridges.
Merlin’s tweaks imply its merchandise value greater than typical photo voltaic panels, which has pressured it to get artistic with who it sells to. “We go into areas the place we’re not competing singularly on value,” Murali mentioned. “When I’m minimizing idling of a truck, I’m going up towards soiled and costly vitality produced by burning diesel. And so once I go up towards that, my ROI is usually inside a 12 months and a half.”
Past RV house owners and shippers, the corporate can also be eyeing the rooftop photo voltaic enterprise, the place a major share of photo voltaic panels are put in. To scale up, the corporate just lately raised a $31 million Sequence B led by Fifth Wall with participation from Saint Gobain and Ayala.
Merlin hopes that Saint Gobain, one of many largest roofing supplies corporations, will turn out to be one of many startup’s largest prospects, with its panels discovering their approach into Saint Gobain’s photo voltaic shingles, Merlin COO Laura Allen mentioned.
