General Electric has been incubating a startup known as GE Solar since 2012. The company announced last week that the startup has evolved into Distributed Solar Development (DSD), a new business created with BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager. BlackRock will own 80% of DSD through a fund it manages, while the rest will be owned by GE Renewable Energy. It will focus on solar and storage solutions for the residential and C&I solar markets.

While GE has around 20 patent documents in the Thin Film Photovoltaics sector, all of them are dated with the most recent filing date being 2011. We will be keeping an eye on whether this new joint venture will revive GE's patent activity in this space.