The company had hoped its manufacturing process, which utilized organic chemistry, would result in higher efficiency at lower cost than traditional crystalline silicon fabricated solar cells.

Under the Obama administration, Konarka was one of 183 clean-energy companies that got a total of $2.3 billion in tax credits as part of the 2009 stimulus.

"[6] The bankruptcy filing occurred days after a visit by Republican presidential candidate Romney to Solyndra, another bankrupted solar energy firm which also received over $500 million of funding from the United States government.

The fact that Konarka also received a loan in 2003 during Romney's gubernatorial term was noted by Democrats and inserted into the campaign-politics debate.

[9] These materials, as well as positive and negative electrodes made from metallic inks, could be inexpensively spread over a sheet of plastic using printing and coating machines to make solar cells, using roll-to-roll manufacturing, similar to how newspaper is printed on large rolls of paper.

Konarka’s manufacturing process enabled production to scale easily and results in significantly reduced costs over previous generations of solar cells.

[10] Richard Hess, Konarka's president and CEO, said that the company's ability to use existing equipment allowed it to scale up production at one-tenth the cost compared with conventional technologies.

At just two grams in weight and just one millimetre thick, the flexible battery is small enough to be used in low-wattage gadgets - including flat smart cards and mobile phones.

[15] Konarka opened a commercial-scale factory, with the capacity to produce enough polymer-fullerene solar cells every year to generate one gigawatt of electricity, the equivalent of a large nuclear reactor.