Is Thin Film About to Change The Industry?

I read an interesting article in the SF Chronicle this morning about a small company, AQT, that is manufacturing equipment to make thin film CIGS cells.  They are using technology that has been around for a while, reactive sputtering...sounds funny but it's proven (disk drive manufactures have been using it to make hard drive platters).  The idea of using existing equipment is to get capital costs down.  This in turn will help drive the cost of PV well below the $1 per watt point.

The direction they've taken is in contrast to other companies like Solyndra who are developing their own equipment to do this.  AQT claims that improvements have driven up the efficiency to around 12% on their manufactured panels...that's pretty good and makes a very compelling case.  Selling PV at  50 cents a watt could bust the market wide open.  Now they just have to convince large suppliers of PPA's to get on board.  They tend to be very conservative with new technology.  They need to make sure the reliability is there over the long haul before they commit since a high number of failures can hugely affect their margins (this is not so critical in the residental space).

It will be interesting to see how this plays out but I predict that thin film will be leading the charge going in to the next phase of PV.