Website www.flisom.ch Headquarters Dübendorf | Founded 2005 | |
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Type Aktiengesellschaft, Privately held company | ||
Flisom is a developer and manufacturer of photovoltaic (PV) thin film solar cells, located near Zurich, Switzerland. The company produces high-efficiency CIGS thin film solar modules on flexible plastic foil using proprietary roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques.
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These light-weight solar modules suggest the feasibility of reducing module costs below €0.35 ($0.39) per watt-peak (Wp) and to bring down the overall costs for fully installed solar PV systems below €0.60/Wp ($0.67/Wp). This is about half the cost of conventional PV technology based on crystalline silicon.
Potential applications for flexible CIGS modules include utility-scale solar farms, building integrated and applied photovoltaics (BIPV, BAPV), as well as transportation and portable power systems.
2009 finalist for the energy environment award flisom
History
Flisom AG was founded in 2005 as a spin-off company of ETH Zurich, and has a long-standing research partnership with Empa – the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science and Technology, which has been developing this type of flexible solar cell to world record efficiencies of 20.4%. The world record for CIGS cells in laboratory conditions has since been further increased by ZSW (German: Zentrum für Sonnenenergie- und Wasserstoff-Forschung) and stands at 21.7% as of July 2015. Since this record was achieved on glass substrate, Flisom`s research partner Empa is still the holder of the world record with 20.4% cell efficiency on a polymeric substrate.
Technology
The company's production technology is based on a roll-to-roll manufacturing process of flexible solar modules, involving deposition of thin films of CIGS absorber material onto a polymer foil substrate made of polyimide. The key processes of depositing the absorber material in this manner has been proprietarily developed by the company itself. As of 2015, a 15 MW pilot production line is being commissioned in a new facility in Niederhasli, near Zurich, Switzerland.