ELI5, how are solar panels made and can they be made in a form that isn’t a rigid rectangle?
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Solar panels are made up of variants of silicon crystals. Each cell is a crystal that have been carefully grown in a lab to have these special properties. The crystals are like most crystals hard as rock and brittle. We make them into rectangles because it is convenient for us. Actually the cells are made as circles and then cut into squares so they are easier to work with. The advantage of using rectangles is that it is easy to stack them without any gaps between the cells. It is not impossible to make triangular solar panels, you can even make it fill all the space. However it is not as easy and there are a lot more constraints in doing this.
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