Skylab Space Station cluster seen from Command Module 3, 1973. The Skylab space station first launched in May 1973, and was occupied in succession by three teams of three crewmembers. These crews orbited the Earth and performed nearly 300 experiments. The Skylab 3 mission began on 28 July and ended on 25 September 1973. Artist NASA. (Photo by Heritage Space/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
Getty Images
“What if everyone could have their own satellite?” the Founder & CEO of Cando Solar Dr. John Huang asks, during his keynote session at the SATShow 2026, half in jest. It sounds like a wild idea. In his view, future of space is moving toward energy decentralization, where solar power enables “energy abundance”—enough for individuals to one day power their own satellites.
For decades, solar innovation has been measured in better performance per square meter. But according to Cando Solar, an energy startup from Singapore, that framework is starting to break down. To reach energy abundance, power itself has to become much cheaper and easier to scale and access—and that’s the problem this startup claims to have solved.
A New Metric for an Energy-Hungry Era
At the center of Cando Solar’s thesis is a rather simple idea: the solar energy’s generation performance should be measured not by a solar panel’s surface alone, but by weight.
Traditional solar panels optimize for efficiency per square meter. But in emerging applications—satellites, robotics, and drones—weight is often the primary constraint. Every additional kilogram increases launch costs, reduces payload flexibility, or limits mobility.
As modern satellites are far more power-hungry than their predecessors, high-bandwidth communications are pushing energy requirements to achieve tens to hundreds of kilowatts per assignment. But beneath that growth lies a structural bottleneck: the lack of energy supply.
“The demand for energy across AI computing, satellites, and all industries is growing exponentially. Once you change the performance metric,” Dr. Huang explains, “the entire solution space changes.”
Cando Solar CEO Dr. John Huang’s presentation of the company’s “solar cloth” technology at SATShow 2026
Author
From Solar Panels to Solar Cloth
Cando Solar’s answer is an avant-garde approach to the old-fashioned solar panel design: a lightweight, rollable solar panel the company describes as the “solar cloth”.
Unlike traditional rigid, heavy, Z-fold panels, which rely on complex mechanical structures and deployment systems, solar cloth minimizes structural stress points. It can be rolled and integrated with fewer moving parts and more flexibility, reducing failure risks and logistics complexity at deployment.
The philosophy behind its lightweight, rollable design is straightforward: simplify to scale. “Less is more,” Dr. Huang believes, “If you simplify manufacturing using the right, reliable materials, you improve durability, efficiency, and lower cost at the same time.”
Besides, the company is focused on system-level value—how energy is packaged, deployed, and used. The CEO offers a simple analogy: a bottle of water has little intrinsic value, but its packaging and design—clean, portable, accessible—makes it indispensable. Cando Solar’s energy services, he argues, follows the similar logic.
Dr. John Huang showcases a rollable solar cloth with a built-in battery at SATShow 2026, demonstrating its potential to power a Tesla vehicle
Author
By turning solar energy into modular, “Lego-like” components, Cando Solar aims to make energy generation easy to integrate into a wide range of applications. Electric vehicles, modern buildings, and portable devices can directly incorporate Cando’s power generation system through customizable designs offered by the company.
Silicon Wins the Scalable Market
In a field exploring materials like GaAs and perovskites, Cando Solar’s focus on silicon might seem conservative at glance. In practice, it’s a strategic bet on an emerging market with vast potential to scale.
While GaAs offers higher efficiency and stability, it comes with significantly higher costs. Perovskites, meanwhile, remain promising but unproven at scale, with its durability still a major concern. Silicon, by contrast, benefits from decades of manufacturing maturity and a deeply established global supply chain.
“Silicon does not lead to the highest efficiency,” the Cando Solar CEO acknowledges. “But when you look at power per gram and cost altogether, it becomes fairly competitive and much more scalable in the next immediate years.”
That scalability underpins the company’s broader ambition: moving beyond niche aerospace applications toward mass adoption across industries to feed the demand of the energy-hungry market.
The Solar Innovation
Cando Solar’s origins reflect the scale of that ambition. The startup, founded as recently as2021, was built on more than two decades of prior research and development as well as Dr. John Huang’s determination to innovate a product that’s meaningfully unique in the energy field.
From the outset, the team has been developing technologies that were only challenging and revolutionary. “If this can be done by anyone, we don’t do it. But if it has never been done before, then we ‘can do’,” Dr. Huang says—a line that neatly echoes the company’s name.
That belief led them to accomplishing one of the hardest challenges in solar engineering: creating a “stress-free interconnection” that allows different materials—each with distinct mechanical and thermal properties—to function as a single, flexible system. While its development process involved repeated setbacks, the company has managed to secure 170 patents worldwide, and that persistence, Dr. Huang argues, is what enables the breakthrough innovation his team is building.
Toward Energy Abundance
For Cando Solar, the goal is what the CEO describes as “energy abundance”, a world where energy is not just cheaper, but effectively everywhere, embedded into everyday devices, seamlessly integrated into infrastructure, and accessible without specialized knowledge.
The idea of everyone owning a satellite may still sound far-fetched. But if energy becomes as lightweight and convenient as the company envisions, the line between centralized power systems and energy independence could begin to dissolve—bringing even the most improbable ambitions within reach.
