8 Solar Energy: Working at the Edge of Feasibility (1979–2007)

Ovshinsky's vision of solar energy focused on making efficient and affordable solar panels “by the mile.” While he could clearly imagine this goal, ECD scientists were faced with the enormous practical problems of continuously passing a flexible stainless steel substrate, the web, on which thin layers of amorphous silicon would be deposited, through a series of gas-filled chambers without any cross-contamination. As the physicist Joe Doehler observed, the challenge forced them to work “at the edge of feasibility.”