The solar technology to solve the carbon crisis
A major user of fossil fuels for heating, lighting and air-conditioning are buildings, which are responsible for 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in the EU. Thanks to better design and insulation, new buildings generally take less than a fifth of the amount of heating than older buildings and moving forward, the EU has set a target for all new buildings to be nearly zero-energy by 2020.
But what about older buildings? About 35% of the EU’s buildings are over 50 years old. Retrofitting insulation can help reduce heat loss but not to near zero-energy levels. To achieve carbon neutral and even produce surplus electricity one needs solar panels that can be fitted to both new and old buildings.
In a report, launched at the end of September 2016, the European Renewable Energies Federation, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the European Federation of Renewable Energy Cooperatives predict that half the citizens of the EU could be producing energy by 2050, accounting for 45% of electricity needs in the EU with solar on buildings being a major contributor.
This will be a major change in the electricity market. Instead of centralised power generation from fossil fuel burning with a power distribution network, each building will produce its own power from solar.
Heliatek of Dresden, Germany intends to be the leader in helping the world achieve this de-centralised, de-carbonised future. It has invented and patented photovoltaic film technology that offers many unique advantages compared to conventional silicon cells.
Called heliafilm®, it has small organic molecules that are vapour deposited in layers onto a long roll of PET plastic in a roll-to-roll process. Vapour deposition enables much greater precision to be achieved than printing and has already been perfected by the OLED manufacturing industry enabling Heliatek to repurpose state-of-the-art OLED manufacturing machines for its own use rather than having to invent them.
The organic molecules have an expected lifespan in excess of 25 years according to accelerated ageing tests and the flexible cells outperform the required solar cell industry standard tests for degradation in severe condition.
Manufacturing is also green as it only needs a gram of organic material per square metre of film, low energy input with a payback of less than three months (unlike silicon cells that need a high energy input to manufacture and can take years to become carbon neutral) plus, at end of life, it is fully recyclable with PET plastic bottles as the organic molecules are non-toxic.
A key feature of heliafilm® is its excellent energy harvesting performance under real world conditions that closes the gap with silicon cells when annual energy harvesting figures are compared. Heliafilm’s efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity is not affected by low light conditions where it is up 25% better than crystalline technology, the angle of the incoming sunlight or temperature – three things that can significantly reduce the harvesting capabilities of convention silicon cells.
Ironically, silicon cells are usually sited to be in full sunlight but this can heat them up to high temperatures and then their efficiency drops unlike heliafilm®.
Heliafilm® is thin, lightweight and flexible. It can be opaque or semi-transparent and is available in a variety of colours with grey/blue being the most popular as it blends best with buildings. These features are best leveraged for use on buildings and Heliatek has partnered with two leading companies in this area to help them develop products.
SVK, who is a leading supplier of concrete façades, to integrate heliafilm® onto the surface of façade blocks when they are cast and AGC, who are Europe’s leading glass maker, to create windows and glass panels that can generate electricity. In addition, there are over twenty other partners around the world creating new products that use the unique features of heliafilm®.
The company is deliberately not taking on silicon cells at the moment but is focussed on Building Integrated Organic Photovoltaic (BIOPV) where heliafilm’s usps provide a compellingly better solution.
Every building could become a light-powered, self-sufficient energy harvester with heliafilm®. As a result, demand for heliafilm® has outstripped the capacity of its pilot plant that has been operating since 2012 producing 30cm wide film that is less than a millimetre thick. This proven demand enabled Heliatek to close an 80 million Euro investment round in September 2016 that will be primarily used for a new 1.2m wide roll-to-roll system, capable of producing a million square metres a year.
1.2m wide film is ideal for the building industry as it enables large single units of solar film of almost any length to be created that will reduce installation and manufacturing costs.
The next generation heliafilm® will also have higher yields. The current, two layer film has an efficiency of around 8.5% which will be increased to over 10% by having three layers to absorb more of the spectrum and improved energy harvesting molecules. 10% has been identified by Heliatek as the tipping point for large-scale commercial use of heliafilm® by the building industry because it’s real world harvesting capabilities and physical characteristics make this a perfect solution for the building industry. Heliatek expects to achieve 16% in a few years.
These physical characteristics of light weight, thin and flexible open up building installation possibilities that cannot be serviced by silicon cells. The problem with silicon cells is that they are heavy and need strong frames to support them. Many existing walls and roofs cannot take the extra weight. Heliafilm® weighs less than a kilogram per square metre and thus does not require heavy support structures so it can be used on a wide variety of surfaces – even thin metal roofs that exist by the many millions of square metres on light industrial units and now can become solar harvesters. Silicon cells also need to be oriented towards the sun, which limits the installation possibilities. Heliatek can work in any orientation so that every external surface including windows of a building could become a solar energy harvester.
Heliatek’s mission is to bring affordable, distributed power generation to the four corners of the world. But the ability to make every building its own power station is a multi-billion euro potential market and Heliatek has made sure that it will not be easy for rivals to take a share by having three barriers to entry.
The first are the family of organic molecules that Heliatek’s R&D team in Ulm, Germany have developed and patented, which have enabled the company to consistently break world records for organic photovoltaic efficiency and they currently hold with 13.2%.
Second is the active structure of the film that is protected by patents and the trade secrets of its manufacture which, at only 250nm thick , is virtually impossible to reverse engineer. Third is the roll-to-roll plant that Heliatek integrates from several suppliers to not only create the optimum manufacturing line but also to prevent rivals from easily replicating it.
Four mega-trends are currently intersecting which are:
- Distributed Energy generation: the world is changing from a centralized generation model to a decentralized one.
The investment by energy companies, Innogy and Engie, in Heliatek’s latest round shows that they understand this change and want to be an integral part of it.Heliafilm enables the distributed generation of electricity on domestic, industrial and commercial buildings.
- Urbanization: Continuing population growth and urbanization are projected to add 2.5 billion people to the world’s urban population by 2050, with nearly 90 per cent of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa.These places often do not have existing centralised power systems and so can leap straight to decentralised power in the same way that mobile phones leapfrogged non-existent landlines infrastructures. As a representative of the Singapore government smartly put it, heliafilm is the only solar technology that is urban fit.
- Under the Climate Change action in the COP21 agreement signed last year in Paris, the world needs to reduce CO2 emission and to have green generation of electricity. Heliatek offers the only truly green solar technology that can consistently harvest efficiently in the real world.
- Electrification: In the last 30 years, the consumption of electricity per capita has more than doubled worldwide. Everyone now has more electrical devices at home and on themselves. The advance of electro-mobility is going to accelerate this trend. Heliafilm will allow power generation where it is consumed without transport losses and costly machinery.
Heliatek is uniquely positioned at the intersection of these four megatrends with the right product at the right time in the right markets achieving the three Ds – De-carbonising, De-centralising and Disrupting. As a result, Heliatek will provide zero-carbon power for everyone. As the Company says – the Future is Light.
About the author:
Thibaud Le Séguillon is the CEO of Heliatek – www.heliatek.com
Related articles:
Heliatek raises €80m for high volume roll-to-roll solar film production
Heliatek claims OPV world record efficiency of 13.2 percent
Heliatek completes world’s first BIOPV concrete façade installation
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