Photo voltaic panels are nearly in every single place. There’s a very good probability considered one of your neighbors has them on their roof, as does the massive field retailer down the road. As you drive there, you may see a area of them posted up alongside the highway. With that sort of ubiquity, you’d be forgiven if you happen to thought there wasn’t room for enchancment.
Venkatesan Murali wish to show you improper.
Murali, founder and CTO of Merlin Photo voltaic, has been working a special approach on photo voltaic for practically 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 price 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 an alternative, 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. “All the pieces crystalline will ultimately crack,” Murali mentioned. “Can we make certain each electron will discover its means, even when a bullet went via?”
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 might bounce again after being bent.
“Rapidly, we had a product that was not solely immune to 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 observe 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 net of connections permits extra energy to route across the shaded cell.
The added flexibility, mild weight, and talent 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 scale back idling or using fossil fuels to energy onboard fridges.
Merlin’s tweaks imply its merchandise price greater than typical photo voltaic panels, which has pressured it to get inventive with who it sells to. “We go into areas the place we aren’t competing singularly on price,” 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 after 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 be eyeing the rooftop photo voltaic enterprise, the place a big 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 grow to be one of many startup’s largest prospects, with its panels discovering their means into Saint Gobain’s photo voltaic shingles, Merlin COO Laura Allen mentioned.
