Solar PV Energy Materials
Sunovia, together with EPIR Technologies, is developing solar cell materials that combine the most prevalent photovoltaic (PV) semiconductors in the market today-cadmium telluride (CdTe) and silicon (Si)-into a breakthrough multijunction solar cell that leverages the economies of scale and manufacturing infrastructure that is associated with these materials. As CdTe is more abundant and affordable than most other semiconductors, we believe our next-generation solar cells will rival the most efficient multijunction solar cell performance in existence today at asignificantly lower cost.
The enabling high-throughput manufacturing technologies for growing CdTe on Si have been proven by the University of Illinois at Chicago and successfully transferred by EPIR into night vision (IR) sensors over the past decade. Today, the technologies that have enabled the commercialization of night vision sensors and military superiority through “Owning the Night” are now being used to accelerate the development of next generation, multijunction solar cell materials that position Sunovia and EPIR for “Owning the Daylight.”
In contrast to the approximate 16% efficiency attained under the best conditions (and less than 10% efficiency in real world modules) for amorphous or polycrystalline CdTe solar cells at other laboratories, the EPIR calculations for single-crystal CdTe solar cells gave an efficiency of 24% using realistic assumptions and numbers characteristic of CdTe of typical crystal quality for material grown on silicon by high throughput molecular beam epitaxial (MBE) deposition methods developed by EPIR.