It’s good news for solar advocates and bad news for competitors: General Electric is breaking into the solar business in a major way. In April, GE announced it had built a solar module with the highest publicly reported efficiency rate for cadmium telluride thin film — the most popular low-cost solar technology. The commercial module topped out at 12.8%, according to independent testers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — nearly 3 percentage points higher than the industry average.
