Merlin Solar bets the curvy panels will help it land on roofs everywhere

Solar panels are almost everywhere. There’s likelihood one among your neighbors has them on their roof, as does the big store down the street. As you drive there, you could see a field of them displayed along the road. With such ubiquity, you would be forgiven for pondering there isn’t any room for improvement.

Venkatesan Murali would really like to prove you unsuitable.

Murali, founder and CTO of the company Merlin Solarhas been working on a brand new approach to solar energy for nearly a decade. He founded the company in 2016, after Solyndra’s spectacular implosion in 2011, as Chinese manufacturers pushed panels down a dizzying cost curve. Murali, nonetheless, remained unmoved, although he learned lessons from this defeat.

“Don’t scare people with something new,” he told TechCrunch. “No new particles, no new physics.”

Instead, Merlin Solar turned to an existing and widely used solar technology, monocrystalline silicon. Solar cells constituted of this material are inexpensive but fragile; to forestall cracking, corporations typically encase monocrystalline silicon in two panels of glass surrounded by a metal frame. This makes the panels heavy and limits where they might be installed.

Murali wanted flexible solar panels, but using monocrystalline silicon was a challenge. “Everything crystalline will eventually crack,” Murali said. “Can we be sure that every electron will find its way, even if a bullet goes through it?”

To answer this query, the company modified the way the cells are connected in the panel. Merlin increased the variety of joints at the front and rear, and between the links made the joints springy in order that they may bounce when bent.

“Suddenly we had a product that was not only crack-resistant, but also electrically crack-resistant,” he said.

Merlin panels are much lighter than a typical glass panel, and their flexible nature changes the way and place of their installation. The panels have adhesive on the packaging, so that they might be stuck to the surface like a toddler’s sticker. The curved design follows the contours of assorted surfaces, allowing for installation on, for instance, the roof of a Winnebago Airstream trailer.

Merlin claims its panels cope higher with partial shading than traditional panels. In a conventional panel, when something like a leaf shades the corner of the cell, energy production drops dramatically. Merlin’s network of connections allows more power to be distributed around the shaded cell.

The added flexibility, light weight and skill to handle shading have made Merlin panels a favourite amongst recreational vehicle owners. The company also sold panels to corporations reminiscent of Perdue, Daimler and Ryder to be used of their trucks, which allowed them to scale back idling or use of fossil fuels to power on-board fridges.

Merlin’s improvements mean its products cost greater than typical solar panels, which has forced the company to get creative with who it sells to. “We are entering spaces where we don’t compete solely on cost,” Murali said. “When I minimize vehicle idling time, I expose myself to the dirty and expensive energy produced by burning diesel fuel. So when I go against it, my return on investment is usually a year and a half.”

In addition to RV owners and shippers, the company can be the rooftop photovoltaics industry, where a good portion of solar panels are installed. To scale its operations, the company recently raised $31 million in Series B funding led by Fifth Wall with participation from Saint Gobain and Ayala.

Merlin hopes that Saint Gobain, one among the largest roofing corporations, will grow to be one among the startup’s largest customers and its panels will go into Saint Gobain solar shingles, said Laura Allen, Merlin’s chief operating officer.