Solar Panel technology has been at a plateau for arguably the last two decades. Since the Cold War days, when the space race fuelled large investment into solar technology, solar panels have struggled to find widespread acceptance.

The reasons are simple: for most people, apart from those who live in remote areas off the grid, solar panels aren't economically viable. In other words, in most cases it's cheaper to buy energy from power companies for twenty years than it is to buy a solar panel and have it make energy for twenty years.

This is beginning to change.

Advances in solar technology mean that it is finally starting to be competitive, on a domestic scale, with conventional energy. And one of the fastest growing areas within solar power is thin film Photovoltaics.

Simply put, thin film photovoltaics are solar panels. Very thin solar panels. In fact, some of them have layers of silicon only a few micrometers thick.

They produce electricity in a variety of ways, depending on what material they are made of.

Once the solar panel industry began to grow, the first barrier it came across was a shortage of silicon. Currently, solar panel manufacturers are not able to keep up with the demand for solar panels.

So, when silicon became a scarce commodity, thin film photovoltaics became a solution.

The difference between thin film and conventional photovoltaics

Conventional photovoltaics use wafer thin slices of crytaline silicon, joined together in series of cells. This is labor intensive material intensive.

Thin film photovoltaics use layers of amorphous silicon only a few micrometers thick. These layers are laid onto a substrate in a method similar to a printing press. This Solar Printing Press means that more solar panels can be made, faster, using less expensive materials.

Organic/polymer solar cells - degrade over time, but are very cheap to produce.

Light-absorbing dyes - transluscent. They copy the oldest of the sun power gatherers - plants.

Amorphous Silicon (a-Si) - a non-crystalline form of silion. 5-7% commercially produced efficiency.

Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) approx. 7% commercially produced efficiency.

Copper Indium Diselenide (CuInSe2, or CIS) 10-17%, but with problems related to defects during production

Currently, thin film photovoltaics are less efficient than conventional photovoltaics.

If thin film photovoltaics can crack the code to lay micrometers of material in a perfect electricity conducting array, they may indeed lead the solar panel market.

Honda has already thrown in their share with thin-film technologies. They sold off their main solar panel business to invest solely in thin-film photovoltaics

Thin Film Solar has several qualities that could be developed in surprising ways.

Firstly, the panels can be flexible. This makes seemingly way out ideas like solar sails for yachts a possibility.

Thin film light aborbing dye panels can also be transluscent. This leads to speculation on solar windows, skylights and billboards.

Thin film photovoltaics are also very light and portable. They have already been used in products like solar camera-bag chargers and portable cell phone chargers. As efficiency increases, portable solar may become much more widely used.