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"Twin Creeks, a start-up company headquartered in San Jose, CA, aims to revolutionize the solar industry by combining old Soviet technology and newfangled American innovation to enable the production of flexible, ultra-thin solar cells at half the cost of the current industry standard.
Twin Creeks is doing this by selling copies of its first, and to date, only, product: Hyperion, a room-sized particle accelerator that slices off wafers of silicon, the most common ingredient in solar cells, at the molecular level.
To that end, Twin Creeks aims to offer manufacturers a way to bring down the cost of solar cells — those are the constituent parts that make up a solar panel — from about 80 cents per watt to 40 cents per watt.
The process is called “proton-induced exfoliation,” and Twin Creeks compares it to a “proton knife,” albeit an extremely fine and precise one, capable of slicing sheets of materials ranging from silicon to diamond into 20 micron-thick segments, about half the thickness of a human hair.
“Proton exfoliation was a phenomena first discovered by the Soviet Union in the 1980s,” Twin Creeks spokesman Michael Kanellos, in an interview with TPM. “They found that in their nuclear reactors, the steel walls around the reactor cores were deteriorating because hydrogen ions from the reactors were getting under steel.”
The technology eventually made its way into scientific literature and was used to create semiconductors that are found in most modern electronics.
Flash forward to 2008, when Siva Sivaram, a former executive manager at SanDisk and Intel, now Twin Creeks’ CEO, began reading papers on the subject. He and his friend, physicist and venture capitalist Alain Harrus, began to think about the various novel ways that the technology could be used.
“Nobody had ever thought of it to make really thin solar panels,” Kanellos told TPM. “But they did.”
"Twin Creeks, a start-up company headquartered in San Jose, CA, aims to revolutionize the solar industry by combining old Soviet technology and newfangled American innovation to enable the production of flexible, ultra-thin solar cells at half the cost of the current industry standard.
Twin Creeks is doing this by selling copies of its first, and to date, only, product: Hyperion, a room-sized particle accelerator that slices off wafers of silicon, the most common ingredient in solar cells, at the molecular level.
To that end, Twin Creeks aims to offer manufacturers a way to bring down the cost of solar cells — those are the constituent parts that make up a solar panel — from about 80 cents per watt to 40 cents per watt.
The process is called “proton-induced exfoliation,” and Twin Creeks compares it to a “proton knife,” albeit an extremely fine and precise one, capable of slicing sheets of materials ranging from silicon to diamond into 20 micron-thick segments, about half the thickness of a human hair.
“Proton exfoliation was a phenomena first discovered by the Soviet Union in the 1980s,” Twin Creeks spokesman Michael Kanellos, in an interview with TPM. “They found that in their nuclear reactors, the steel walls around the reactor cores were deteriorating because hydrogen ions from the reactors were getting under steel.”
The technology eventually made its way into scientific literature and was used to create semiconductors that are found in most modern electronics.
Flash forward to 2008, when Siva Sivaram, a former executive manager at SanDisk and Intel, now Twin Creeks’ CEO, began reading papers on the subject. He and his friend, physicist and venture capitalist Alain Harrus, began to think about the various novel ways that the technology could be used.
“Nobody had ever thought of it to make really thin solar panels,” Kanellos told TPM. “But they did.”