Extracted from NanoSolar Blog
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 first product and received our first check of product revenue.
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 printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;
- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;
- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at 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.
[These are obviously not the first three we ever produced – we have produced loads for testing – but these are the first three of what we consider our commercial panels.]
