Solar panels are just about everywhere. There’s a good chance one of your neighbors has them on their roof, as does the big box store down the street. As you drive there, you might see a field of them posted up alongside the road. With that kind of ubiquity, you’d be forgiven if you thought there wasn’t room for improvement.
Venkatesan Murali would like to prove you wrong.
Murali, founder and CTO of Merlin Solar, has been working a new angle on solar for nearly a decade. He founded the company in 2016, after Solyndra’s spectacular implosion in 2011 and as Chinese manufacturers were driving panels down a vertiginous cost curve. But Murali remained fixated, though he did take a lesson from the debacle.
“Don’t scare the heck out of people with something new,” he told TechCrunch. “No new molecules, no new physics.”
Instead, Merlin Solar turned to an existing and widely used solar technology, monocrystalline silicon. Solar cells made with the stuff are inexpensive but fragile; to prevent fractures, companies usually sandwich monocrystalline silicon within two panels of glass bordered by a metal frame. That makes panels heavy, and it limits where they can be installed.
Murali wanted flexible solar panels, but using monocrystalline silicon posed a challenge. “Everything crystalline will eventually crack,” Murali said. “Can we make sure every electron will find its way, even if a bullet went through?”
To answer that, the company changed the way cells are connected within a panel. Merlin beefed up the number of connections front and back and, between cells, made the interconnects springy so they could bounce back after being bent.
“All of a sudden, we had a product that was not only resistant to cracking, but electrically resilient to cracking,” he said.
Merlin’s panels are significantly lighter than a typical glass panel, and their flexible nature changes how and where they can be installed. The panels come with an adhesive on the pack, so they can be attached to surfaces just like a child’s sticker. The bendy structure can follow the contours of different surfaces, allowing them to mount flush atop the roof of an Winnebago Airstream trailer, for example.
Merlin says its panels can cope with partial shading better than traditional panels. In a traditional panel, once something like a leaf shades a corner of the cell, power production drops off dramatically. Merlin’s web of connections allows more power to route around the shaded cell.
The added flexibility, light weight, and ability to handle shading has made Merlin’s panels a favorite among recreational vehicles owners. The company has also sold panels to companies like Perdue, Daimler, and Ryder for use on their trucks, allowing them to reduce idling or the use of fossil fuels to power onboard refrigerators.
Merlin’s tweaks mean its products cost more than typical solar panels, which has forced it to get creative with who it sells to. “We go into spaces where we are not competing singularly on cost,” Murali said. “When I am minimizing idling of a truck, I’m going up against dirty and expensive energy produced by burning diesel. And so when I go up against that, my ROI is typically within a year and a half.”
Beyond RV owners and shippers, the company is also eyeing the rooftop solar business, where a significant share of solar panels are installed. To scale up, the company recently raised a $31 million Series B led by Fifth Wall with participation from Saint Gobain and Ayala.
Merlin hopes that Saint Gobain, one of the largest roofing materials companies, will become one of the startup’s largest customers, with its panels finding their way into Saint Gobain’s solar shingles, Merlin COO Laura Allen said.