SOURCE: Solarmer Energy, Inc.

September 26, 2008 08:00 ET

OSC 2008 -- Solarmer Energy, Inc. to Present on Plastic Solar Cells With Greater Than 5% Efficiency

EL MONTE, CA--(Marketwire - September 26, 2008) - Dr. Vishal Shrotriya, Director of Technology Development, will present Solarmer Energy, Inc.'s progress toward delivering commercial grade plastic solar cells and future plans at the Organic Semiconductor Conference in Frankfurt, Germany on September 30, 2008. The talk will focus on three key efforts contributing to significant progress towards the company's goals: success in materials development leading to improvements in efficiency, an emphasis on making translucent solar cells a reality, and plans to prove the manufacturability of Solarmer's plastic solar cells.

The company is enthusiastic about the opportunity to present their latest developments in solar cell efficiency, results indicating that they have reached greater than 5% efficiency with three different materials. As a result of the differing characteristics of these materials, the path to greater than 7% efficiency has become clearer, an important step for the company.

"We are very excited about having the flexibility to work with three distinct polymer systems that have attained more than 5% efficiency in the lab," said Dr. Yue Wu, Senior Researcher and leader of Solarmer's Device Engineering team. "These results were made possible through the successful combination of the device engineering and materials development expertise of Solarmer and our partners, and will give us multiple routes to explore to achieve higher efficiency and successful delivery of our commercial grade prototype."

Solarmer has defined its commercial grade prototype as having 8% efficiency and 3+ years lifetime in a solar cell that is at least 50 cm squared and plans to demonstrate this prototype in approximately a year.

"In a short time, we should be able to seek NREL certification of our champion cells, certification that will indicate competitiveness with the world record in our field," said Woolas Hsieh, President of Solarmer Energy, Inc.

The talk will also detail the company's efforts to fabricate viable translucent solar cells, opening up a broad range of applications that are not possible with traditional solar cell technology, and the launch of their project to design a pilot line that will prove manufacturability of their solar cells.

About Solarmer Energy, Inc.

Solarmer Energy, Inc., which was founded in 2006 to commercialize technology developed at UCLA, is a developer of flexible, translucent plastic solar cells which generate low-cost, clean energy from the sun. With its unique expertise in device engineering, Solarmer Energy is poised to consistently provide efficiency improvements to any new plastic photovoltaic material. The company is building upon its partnerships on both sides of the supply chain for successful deployment of this technology. Solarmer is working in collaboration with research partners to develop the next generation of technologies essential to this field and is preparing to leverage its partnership with AMREL to launch its first products into the market. For more information, please visit www.solarmer.com.