PARC VP: Lowering costs with clean tech

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Speaker 1: Now your area of specialty, in part, has been in ink jet printing. And now you're taking that technology and moving it into the clean tech space. How -- what's involved with that?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so that may sound like an unlikely connection, so I -- my history is doing ink jet printing. So it's about putting drops down on paper to form images. And what we found is that in the clean tech space where cost is paramount, we've -- you got to get solutions that are very low cost because the need is to proliferate them so widely in the world. Printing turns out to be a really powerful technique to go to the ultimate low cost in whatever kind of device you want to make. So if you can apply printing approaches to photable-tags for example, that will get you to a lower price per watt, if you will. And make the proliferation of photable-tags even broader.

Speaker 1: Sp you're talking about, basically, spraying photable-tag material across acres?

Speaker 2: That's one idea. We're not actually doing that. What we've done is, based on the history of doing ink jet and other kinds of marking technology is what we call them, we've actually invented a completely new method for putting the front metal lines on solar cells. If you take a look a solar cell in a panel, you'll see there are these little silver lines. Those are essential to pull the current, or the electricity out of the cell. And one of the big issues with them is that they're -- they tend to be too wide. They're done using screen-printing, which is a standard method used in industry, but they tend to be too wide. And so the -- they shadow the sunlight. Less sunlight reaches the solar cell than could otherwise if the lines were more narrow. So we invented a completely new method. It's not inkjet. It's not anything that has ever existed before. But it's based on those competencies, if you will, that we were able to come up with that.

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