Photo voltaic panels are nearly in all places. There’s an excellent 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 may see a area of them posted up alongside the street. With that form of ubiquity, you’d be forgiven in the event you thought there wasn’t room for enchancment.
Venkatesan Murali wish to show you mistaken.
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 current and extensively used photo voltaic expertise — monocrystalline silicon. Photo voltaic cells made with the stuff are cheap however fragile; to stop fractures, corporations normally sandwich monocrystalline silicon inside two panels of glass bordered by a metallic body. That makes panels heavy, and it limits the place they are often put in.
Murali needed versatile photo voltaic panels, however utilizing monocrystalline silicon posed a problem. “The whole lot crystalline will ultimately crack,” Murali mentioned. “Can we ensure that each electron will discover its manner, even when a bullet went by way of?”
To reply that, the corporate modified the way in which 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.
“Hastily, 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 adjustments 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 similar 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 Airstream trailer, for instance.
Merlin says its panels can address 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 talent to deal with shading has made Merlin’s panels a favourite amongst leisure autos house owners. The corporate has additionally offered 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 value greater than typical photo voltaic panels, which has compelled it to get artistic with who it sells to. “We go into areas the place we aren’t competing singularly on value,” Murali mentioned. “When I’m minimizing idling of a truck, I’m going up towards soiled and costly power 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 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 change into one of many startup’s largest prospects, with its panels discovering their manner into Saint-Gobain’s photo voltaic shingles, Merlin COO Laura Allen mentioned.
