ORNL, Industry Collaboration Puts Spotlight on Solar
Through individual cooperative research and development agreements, or CRADAs, the companies hope to advance solar cell materials and processing technologies. The $880,000 effort is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
“By leveraging our expertise in materials science and manufacturing, ORNL will assist these partners with their individual solar manufacturing challenges and address opportunities to produce high-efficiency devices at substantially lower cost,” said Craig Blue, director of ORNL’s Energy Materials Program.
Solar cell manufacturing encompasses a broad range of disciplines, including crystal growth, continuous thin-film deposition, thermal annealing, barrier coating, joining and scribing techniques and on-line quality control measures.
For these CRADAs, Mossey Creek Solar is producing low-cost high-quality silicon wafers with significant reductions in waste material and energy consumption. Global Solar Energy is developing scalable non-vacuum deposition techniques for thin-film copper indium gallium diselenide, a direct-bandgap material for solar cells. Ferro Corp. is developing inks and pastes to be used for highly conductive layers in thin-film solar cell applications. Ampulse is developing an efficient roll-to-roll manufacturing process to deposit thin-film silicon. For the projects, the industry cost share exceeds 50 percent of the total cost.
Through DOE’s Industrial Technologies Program, ORNL issued a competitive solicitation to industry for proposals addressing key problems related to solar cell manufacturing. These projects were selected following a technical and programmatic review process. ORNL expects to complete the projects within six months.
“These short-term focused projects are designed to provide proof-of-principle for innovative approaches to reducing the cost of solar cell manufacturing,” said Chad Duty, ORNL program manager for Solar Technologies. “This is a unique and timely opportunity for ORNL to work with industry and set the course for a new generation of solar energy technologies.”
Mossey Creek Solar is located in Jefferson City; Global Solar Energy, Tucson, Ariz.; Ferro Corp., Independence, Ohio; and Ampulse, Golden, Colo.
ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy's Office of Science.
Media Contact
More Information:
http://www.ornl.govAll latest news from the category: Power and Electrical Engineering
This topic covers issues related to energy generation, conversion, transportation and consumption and how the industry is addressing the challenge of energy efficiency in general.
innovations-report provides in-depth and informative reports and articles on subjects ranging from wind energy, fuel cell technology, solar energy, geothermal energy, petroleum, gas, nuclear engineering, alternative energy and energy efficiency to fusion, hydrogen and superconductor technologies.
Newest articles
Internet can achieve quantum speed with light saved as sound
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute have developed a new way to create quantum memory: A small drum can store data sent with light in its sonic…
A chip unique in the world
A team from UPV and iPRONICS has manufactured the first universal, programmable and multifunctional photonic chip on the market. A team from the Photonics Research Laboratory (PRL)-iTEAM of the Universitat…
Advance in light-based computing
…shows capabilities for future smart cameras. UCLA-developed experimental device demonstrates ability to reduce glare in images. Researchers developing the next generation of computing technology aim to bring some light to…
