You did read that. The highly inefficient thin film solar cells have almost caught up to the standard silicon solar cells. Although these cells aren't going to be coming into production anytime soon, but the future might hold a drastic price decrease for solar cells.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory have come up with a new formulation for thin film solar cells that can compete with the efficiency of the common silicon based solar cell.

The formulation is copper indium gallium diselenide (otherwise known as CIGS). With this new formulation the researchers have set a new world record of 19.9% efficiency. The silicon based cells have shown efficiencies of up to 20.3% so this is a huge milestone. I personally never thought that thin film would ever reach this efficiency, I figured the thin film solar cells would be used on surfaces where you couldn't use traditional solar cells; however, if these cells can be put into production I might just switch over.

The best part is Nanosolar has announced that their CIGS solar cells will be available for an eye popping 0.99 cents/watt. Unbelievable! With a price like that more people will be able to make the move to solar without burning a hole in their wallet.

Their is still quite a bit of bugs to work out of the process before companies will start manufacturing them, but this process holds the idea of cheap $/watt solar (which is what we need). There are a couple different processes for manufacturing these cells, but to date only one has made it from production in the lab to the production floor. Hopefully sooner rather than later these cells will be available for sale.

When they do become available I'll be grabbing a couple to see whether they're worth all the hype that's been surrounding them.