Our high efficiency, plastic photovoltaic materials are uniquely suited to meet the performance and cost requirements in all market segments where photovoltaic products are found today.  Serving all markets including Space, Near Space, and Terrestrial with a single technology and product platform has not been possible until now.

Older technologies like single junction crystalline silicon that currently dominate the Terrestrial market are unable to meet the demanding performance, weight and volume requirements for Spacecraft and High Altitude Airship applications. As a result, photovoltaic modules for the Space market typically cost as much as $1000/Watt in comparison to the Terrestrial  markets where modules cost under $10/Watt. Even other thin-film technologies including our 1st generation products on metal foil substrates were unable to efficiently meet the high specific power, specific density, and thermal management requirements of the stressing Space and Near Space applications.

Ascent Solar’s 2nd generation product line not only demonstrates superior performance in the Space, Defense, and Homeland Security markets, but is an enabling technology for the emerging High Altitude Airship market. Although our initial focus is in these market areas where we believe our technology enjoys unique performance advantages, we envision new Specialty Civilian market applications and even the broad based Terrestrial market that simply demands low cost simple power solutions are possible long term.

Applications like Solar blinds and Roll shades for homes, Solar tents, Solar awnings, Solar roofing tiles, are all possible.  thin-film photovoltaic technology is very much beginning as the semiconductor industry began in the early 1980’s. Just as the semiconductor industry has improved manufacturing processes and performance and grown in size from its infancy to enable integrated circuit and microprocessors to achieve economies that make microprocessors commonplace today, we similarly envision thin-film photovoltaic products achieving the economies needed to become common place tomorrow.