Roughly 40% of the current global energy demand is consumed in commercial and residential buildings. Thanks to advances in technology, Building Integrated PhotoVoltaics (BIPV) have emerged, enabling all buildings to become electricity producers and strive towards self-sustainability. Due to stringent energy efficiency norms in the EU, demand for BIPV products is soaring: PV incorporated in shells of multi-story buildings is required for supplying these high rise structures with energy. But also other artificial structures, e.g. sound barriers along highways, shall be used for energy provision, without further impact on the environment. Yet, truly integrated and aesthetic BIPV modules are currently neither available in commercial volumes nor at sustainable costs. Prices of products with still limited adaptability hinder the actual market growth. crystalsol addresses these shortcomings with a patented and entirely new type of cost-efficient, flexible and transparent PV technology where advantages of an efficient and stable monocrystalline absorber and low cost roll-to-roll (R2R) module production are combined. Due to the reason that crystalsol is able to produce semi-finished modules that allow full integration into building elements without any expensive and complex integration steps, BIPV products can pricewise finally compete with standard building shell elements (like facades without PV). This offers a huge competitive advantage, resulting in an enormous potential in the BIPV market. This Feasibility Study (cs-BIPV-FS) will bring crystalsol closer to the market entry stage. It will be a first step towards full commercialisation before upscaling the company’s operations and production processes. The cs-BIPV-FS project will help to analyse and conclude the technical feasibility and commercial potential of the ground-breaking BIPV technology, resulting in advancing the innovative technological concept into a credible business case.

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.

The MarketPlace consortium will utilise state of the art information technologies to build an open web-based integrated Materials Modelling and Collaboration platform that acts as one-stop-shop and open Marketplace for providing all determining components that need to be interwoven for successful and accelerated deployment of materials modelling in industry. This includs linking various activities and databases on models, information on simulation tools, communities, expertise exchange, course and training materials, lectures, seminars and tutorials. The proposed MarketPlace will be a central-hub for all materials modelling related activities in Europe and provide tangible tools to connect disparate modelling, translators, and manufacturing communities to provide a vibrant collaboration web-based tool for the advancement of materials modelling in European manufacturing industry. The developed platform will include mechanisms for the integration of interoperable set of advanced materials model workflows for coupling and linking of various discrete (electronic, atomistic, mesoscopic) and continuum models. This will be achieved by developing open and standard post and pre-processing methods that allow complex flow of information from one model to another for both strongly and loosely coupled systems. The Marketplace platform will include access to concerted set of federated databases of materials models, materials data and provide for access to experimental characterisation and stimulate the development of interface wrappers and open simulation platforms. The MarketPlace consortium aims to strengthen the competitiveness and lower the innovation barrier for European industry for product development and process design and optimization using materials modelling.