Zagres Limited – Study, assessment and proof of market potentials and economics of a low-cost solar cell technology

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Cost and efficiency are yet the main barriers to widespread adoption of solar energy, currentlyvalued at £51 billion globally with a compound annual growth rate of 18.7% through to 2020.Commercially available solar cells, which are mostly Silicon-based, cost 0.70 £/Watt and haveefficiencies between 10 to 15%, far from industry's targets of 0.05 £/Watt and 30%,respectively. Alternative solar cell technologies have recently been developed based on newmaterials, such as Dye-sensitized Solar Cells (DSCs) which promise substantial costreduction, by a factor of x10 as compared to Si-based cells through utilising inexpensivematerials and low-cost manufacturing processes, whilst achieving comparable or improvedefficiencies. DSC devices promise a variety of applications, such as consumer electronics andelectricity generation from transparent glass windows. However, existing commercial DSCsare yet expensive, hence have found very limited applications, e.g. Logitech keyboard foriPad.Zagres, spun out from Cambridge University's Centre for Advanced Photonics & Electronics(CAPE), has developed a unique and patent-pending Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD)technology for Nanostructured TiO2 DSCs, which reduces Titanium material use by 300times and has led to a record efficiency of 18.2%, 4.2% higher than alternative DSCs. Thereduction of Titanium use, enabled by our ALD-DSC technology, and the low-cost materialssynthesis and device fabrication processes can lead to a substantial 70% cost reduction whencompared to widely available Silicon-based solar cells, enabling far greater applications tobecome economically viable, e.g. electricity generation from glass windows; its exploitationcan hence contribute to enabling cheaper solar energy whilst maintaining sustainability &material security. The aim of this project is to study, assess and quantify the economics andmarket potentials of the potentially disruptive ALD-DSC technology for low-cost high-volumeapplications.