MiaSole is quickly raising the bar on its own expectations and has started volume production of its 13-percent efficient, thin-film solar panels with plans to start volume production of 14-percent efficient thin film in 2012.

The company has been around 10 years.

“Of course, the first eight years of that were essentially a science project,” said vice president of marketing Rob DeLine.

But the company commercialized two years ago with some of the highest efficiency thin film solar available and has since consistently increased its efficiency rating multiple times per year.

DeLine said the company started in 2011 with a 10-percent efficiency product, upped it to 12 percent in second quarter and is now mass producing panels ranging from 12.6 to 13 percent with plans to scale up production on a 14 percent product in 2012.

“Those are extremely high efficiencies for thin film,” DeLine said.

The company uses tight controls and manufactures each element of its thin film under a vacuum. It also manufactures all of its own hardware and equipment, which allows staff to make quick and responsive changes to the process, DeLine said. It’s working.

Industry standards for thin-film production have hovered around 8 percent, though companies have been announcing record-breaking efficiencies in lab tests throughout the last year.

Few of those companies have scaled up and sold on the open market, however.

The solar market is a tough one to be in right now, DeLine said. And he admits that not all companies working today will make it through. The market is saturated, and eventually some of the start-ups will die off.

While MiaSole faces the same market challenges all solar businesses do, it has tremendous growth potential.

“We’ve been focusing on increasing our average project size and on getting banks comfortable underwriting our technology for large deals,” DeLine said.

The technology has been selected for two large-scale German solar projects, one 6-megawatt deal and the other 11 megawatts.

DeLine said the product is also extremely marketable. Right now, MiaSole sandwiches its flexible metal foil between two glass panels so that it can compete with standard chrystalline panels. But that eliminates a lot of the market differentiation it has as a flexible product that could be adopted into rolled roofing and other materials.

“That flexible cell gives us a platform for future growth,” DeLine said.

Image courtesy of MiaSole.