pv magazine: Solar Inventions looks to redefine cell architecture and save silver with award-winning tech

The winners of the first American-Made Solar Prize are wasting no time bringing their revolutionary product to market, one which promises to reduce silver, increase module power and save manufacturers up to $1 million annually.

While PV system costs are falling faster than anticipated, there is one module component that isn’t following this trend, and is actually rising in cost significantly: silver, the price of which is up nearly 40% from a year ago. As quickly as this issue has arisen, one company has created a solution that claims to be able to reduce silver costs by 3%, while also increasing module power.

Enter Solar Inventions, winners of the first American-Made Solar Prize and creators of the Configurable Current Cell (C3) subcell technology, a new PV cell architecture that creates resistively bounded subcells, effectively putting solar cells into “lanes” by electrically dividing each cell into subcells, allowing current to flow more directly.