In the past 25 years, many integrated photovoltaics (IPV) products have been introduced and demonstrated. Mostly BIPV products, but more recently also IIPV and VIPV products. However, large scale deployment and massive market adoption of these technologies and products have not yet taken place. We are at the brink of a huge scale-up and capacity build-up of PV in Europe, that will have a large effect on our living environment. Therefore, it is now urgent and essential that IPV products become widely available and affordable. This is important (1) to generate solar electricity where the demand is (in the built environment) and (2) to enable multifunctional use of area and space in the built environment. Several parties in the MC2.0 consortium have more than 20 years of experience in IPV development and as such have been involved in many earlier projects and studies. We believe that the number one barrier for large scale market uptake of IPV is the high cost. Other - secondary but also important – barriers are immature sector cooperation and certification issues. The overarching ambition of the MC2.0 project is to demonstrate a cost breakthrough for IPV by means of an advanced manufacturing approach, referred to as “mass customization”. In coherence with this approach, we will contribute to solving the other identified barriers. To realize this ambition, the MC2.0 consortium brings together experts and companies on materials for PV laminates (including PV cells), on manufacturing of PV laminates, on manufacturing of IPV products and on market and application of IPV products.

Humanity is approaching a cornerstone where Climate Change will transform society, industry and economy. Therefore, moving away from inefficient energy consumption and fossil fuels is more urgent than ever. Renewable energy sources are growing fast but their full integration will make necessary not just a boost of their efficiency but rather a quantum leap in energy management. Such paradigm change will come from technologies adaptable to changing climate conditions and, importantly, making use of widely available non-critical materials. ADAPTATION vision is to challenge current paradigms in solar energy harvesting and their integration by developing a new solar material platform that will integrate thermal management and energy collection in a single material, reducing electricity peak profile and allowing easy adaptation of the energy harvesting properties to different climate conditions. For this purpose, we will take inspiration from the two most efficient energy management processes on Earth: photosynthesis and terrestrial radiative cooling. ADAPTATION will mimic simultaneously the strategies followed by plants during photosynthesis to collect and manage energy at the nanoscale and the power-free radiative cooling of Earth by thermal regulation at the microscale. These extraordinary energy collection and managing strategies are robust to disorder and provide self-regulatory cooling capacities which make them ideal to be integrated into a wide spectrum of physical objects, powering them with a sustainable energy source. In ADAPTATION we will develop the building blocks for this technology and will demonstrate its implementation with two sustainable novel device architectures. Our innovative vision is based on the multidisciplinary background of its consortium with experts in geosciences, polaritonic photonics, colloidal and supramolecular chemistry, materials engineering, quantum technologies or photovoltaics including high-tech industrial implementation.

E.T.COMPACT is aimed at reaching technology readiness level four for three in-space technologies on the domain of solar energy harvesting and green propulsion. The first technology, a thin film 2-terminal tandem CIGS/Perovskite module with efficiency larger than 15% and a power-per-weight ratio larger than 50W/kg, is called to reduce the cost of in-space solar panels. The second technology is a miniaturized (target volume 3U) green-propulsion mobility module device based on an electrodynamic tether. Designed to have tether reel-in/reel-out capability and equipped with a field emission cathode, the mobility module can use the harvested in-space solar energy to produce propulsion (both thrust and drag) without using propellant nor expellant. For the mobility module, and the satellite platform to host it, research on ultralight structures based on 3D printed compliant polymeric techniques is conducted. Besides mass reduction, the goal is to integrate compliance mechanisms for both tether deployment and thin-film solar panel unfolding. The third technology, which combines the experience and knowledge of the consortium on photovoltaic and tether technologies, is a novel bare-photovoltaic tether that uses the metallic tape tether for both electron collection and as the back contact of tandem CIGS/Perovskite modules. It integrates in a single device solar energy harvesting and propellant-less propulsion. Project impact is enhanced by activities on market analysis, unit mass production, and early commercialization, solidly supported by simulation work to assess the use of these technologies in the field of post mission disposal, active debris removal, in-orbit servicing and space tugs.

To face the grand challenge of transforming the energy system to include at least 42 % photovoltaic energy in 2050 (as forecasted in a scenario by IRENA), our proposed project, SITA, aims to explore innovative concepts for tandem solar cells based on two technologies with strong competence base in Europe: Silicon Heterojunction (SHJ) and high bandgap Cu(In,Ga)(Se,S)2 (CIGS). A novel tandem concept with a 2-terminal (2T) approach requiring no additional cables or electronics will be developed, enabled by recent and further development in wide gap CIGS devices leading to high efficiency (>18%). SITA will demonstrate the durability of the new modules under realistic outdoor conditions delivering the next generation of stable inorganic tandem solar modules with superior device efficiency (>30%). SITA’s technology will build on and increase the efficiency of SHJ modules by a factor of 1.5 with marginal increase in the use of the costliest raw materials. This in turn leads to a considerable reduction in area related system costs of up to 25 % per installed power and a corresponding reduction in the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). Tandem-junction efficiencies have recently approached or even surpassed the single-junction Shockley-Queisser limit for prototype devices. SITA will address the remaining limitations in terms of stability, scaling and manufacturing costs, as well as environmental impact.

CUSTOM-ART aims at developing the next generation of building and product integrated photovoltaic modules (BIPV and PIVP respectively), based on earth-abundant and fully sustainable thin film technologies. Nowadays, BIPV and PIPV are identified as key enabling technologies to make “near Zero Energy Buildings” and “net Zero Energy Districts” more realistic, through the integration of a new generation of photovoltaic modules capable of entirely replacing architectural/mobility/urban-furniture passive elements. This promising scenario of mass realisation of BIPV and PIPV solutions can only be achieved by developing cost-efficient and sustainable thin film technologies with unbeatable aesthetic functionalities, including mechanical flexibility and optical tuneability. Unfortunately, mature materials already available at the market such as Cu(In,Ga)Se2 or CdTe are formed by scarce and expensive elements (In, Ga and Te), or toxic ones (Cd). Considering this, CUSTOM-ART will join for the first time a leading group of companies and academic partners all around Europe, to develop advanced BIPV and PIPV products (flexible and semi-transparent solar modules), based on earth abundant kesterite materials, which have been demonstrated in two previous European projects to be at the forefront of emerging inorganic thin film technologies. By combining advanced strategies for materials properties management, with customized modules design in a circular economy approach, two types of products will be developed including flexible PV modules (polymer and steel supports) and semi-transparent (polymer). CUSTOM-ART will bring these technologies from TRL4-5 up to TRL7, demonstrating very competitive conversion efficiencies (20% at cell and 16% at module level) and durability (over 35 years), at a reduced production cost (< 75 €/m2), using exclusively abundant elements and contributing to ensure the full sustainability and competitiveness of the European BIPV and PIPV Industry.