The total potential funding from the DoE under the Solar America Initiative (SAI) is up to $3.0 million for the project Self-Aligned Cell: Scaling up manufacture of a cost effective cell architecture for multi-crystalline silicon photovoltaics.

The MIT spin-off 1366 Technologies was awarded the agreement after a technology review under the SAI Incubator Program. 1366 Technologies will use the SAI funds to further develop its Self-Aligned Cell technology which allows cost-effective, scalable manufacturing of multi-crystalline solar cells.

“Increasing cell efficiency without increasing costs is the solar industry’s biggest manufacturing challenge,” says Ely Sachs, Chief Technical Officer at 1366 Technologies. “Our Self-Aligned Cell does exactly this, by producing cells with mono-crystalline efficiencies at multi-crystalline costs. This is a big step toward making solar power competitive with traditional electricity generation.”