• Energy Research
• OA Publications Mandate: Yes close
• 2020 close

According to United Nations, the world population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Food, energy and water are three critical resources that must be managed for mankind to thrive. With these figures, a 70-100% increase in food supply will be needed to maintain our current nutrition levels. Given that agriculture accounts for 14% of world’s energy usage, 70% of water usage and 11% of CO2 emissions, it is clear that new technology is needed for feeding the world in a sustainable way. Greenhouse farming is as it increases the food production per m2 up to 10x compared to open field agriculture, while using 10x less water. However, Greenhouses require 10x the energy to operate. This is the market opportunity driving our technology development Brite has developed PanePower Solar Window (SW) which is a unique transparent (80%) solar glass panel that generates clean energy. The solar glass combines a nanostructured coating material with silicon solar cell technology to deliver a product ideally suited for greenhouse applications. PanePowerSW contributes in reducing the energy operating costs in greenhouses from 25-28% (of their total operating cost) to near zero depending on climate conditions. The technology enables the growth of almost any kind of crop because it is uniformly transparent over the visible spectrum. Our company has won grants from SME Instrument (Phase 1 and Phase 2), which enabled the technology of PanePowerSW to reach a TRL of 7. By applying to the EIC Accelerator Complementary Blended Finance program, we expect to enter the market in 2021, and sell at least 4 million m2 of solar glass (equivalent to over €160 M of cumulative revenue) by 2026. At our exit (within 5-6 years) we project a return on investment for the EIC equity funding of 7x or higher.

I invented a thin plastic foil capable of collecting sunlight from a certain incident angle and guiding it to a spot of intense light emission, thereby concentrating the light by a factor of 300 and more. In the first step, ConPhoNo will evaluate the application of the foils for safety features. Here, the foils will be laminated to a product showing bright colorful pictures when properly aligned to the sun. This application exhibits a high chance of success as the technical feasibility has already been proven, and the relevant market is well-known by the ConPhoNo partner. It is therefore the goal to put these safety features on the market. In parallel, the application of the concentrator foils will be tested in concentrated photovoltaics (CPV), which is the most efficient of all solar energy concepts (world record of 46%). In that case, solar cells will be placed at the spots of intense light emission. Differently from safety features, where a customer is actively checking a product for authenticity by holding it at the right angle into the sun, this is more complex in CPV. In step two, the concentrators will be used with mechanical sun-tracking like state-of-the-art CPV. Here, the concentrator foils will replace the Fresnel lens based concentrators used today. I am confident that these concentrators are superior as they are a hundred times thinner, much easier to produce, and they enable bandgap matching, which may double the efficiency of CPV, reaching a theoretical limit of about 86%. The ability to produce very thin concentrators will also increase the motivation of the CPV industry to scale down the bulkiness of the sun-tracking system. In the third step, it will be evaluated if thin beam steering devices based on electro-wetting may become industrially available and if they can be combined with the new concentrators. The resulting thin CPV modules would drastically reduce the cost of CPV and literally boost worldwide solar energy production.

Why at one or several points in time do Coal and Carbon Intensive Regions (CCIR) flip into fundamentally different development trajectories and embrace clean-energy transformations? TIPPING+ will focus on the critical concept of Social-Ecological Tipping Points (SETPs) to inquire how a much more robust scientific understanding of the socioeconomic, psychological, cultural, gender and political processes leading to SETPs can be used to support clean-energy transitions in CCIR or prevent catastrophic or undesirable outcomes in other ones (e.g. populism and anti-democratic attitudes). TIPPING+ will carry out empirical analyses and advance the state-of-the-art on both negative and positive tipping points. However, a main focus of TIPPING+ will concern the participatory co-production of knowledge on the driving forces and deliberate tipping interventions for positive tipping points toward energy transitions in European CCIR. A typology based on at least 20 regional case studies will be generated with an early engagement of key practitioners examining: 1) New trends, changes and impacts of energy transitions on demographic structures and geographical distribution patterns in gender, migration and youth 2) Community, gender and psychological factors related to energy transitions 3) Policy interventions and governance factors 4) Economic transformations on employment, distributional welfare and energy and natural resources. TIPPING+ builds on the latest social science applied to Transition Theory (Tàbara et al, 2019) which shows that enabling deliberate positive tipping points in development trajectories depend on: a) Collective visions and narratives which frame and provide actionable meaning b) The kinds of transformative capacities to achieve these visions and c) Key strategies, solutions and socio-technical innovations derived from such capacities. International cooperation will also be established with non-European partners in Indonesia, Australia and Canada.