Solar Energy
Seizing solar’s bright future
Seizing solar’s bright future
by Leda Zimmerman | MIT Energy Initiative
Boston MA (SPX) May 07, 2024
Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.
But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.
“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”
With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.
Beyond silicon
Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.
Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.
In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.
But these new materials require testing, both during R and D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.
“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”
“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.
“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.
This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”
According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”
Measuring makes the difference
With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.
Led by Vladimir Bulovic, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.
“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.
“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”
“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”
The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”
Photovoltaics is just the start
The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”
Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.
“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”
That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO2 [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”
The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”
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Solar Energy
China installs record amount of renewable energy in 2024, data shows
China installs record amount of renewable energy in 2024, data shows
by AFP Staff Writers
Beijing (AFP) Jan 21, 2025
China installed a record amount of renewable energy last year, data from the National Energy Administration (NEA) showed on Tuesday.
The country is the world’s biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases scientists say drive global warming and climate change.
Beijing has committed to bring carbon emissions to a peak by 2030 and to net zero by 2060.
China, the world’s second-largest economy, added around 277 gigawatts (GW) of solar power last year, an increase from the 217 GW added from the previous year, the NEA said in a statement.
It also expanded its wind power by nearly 80 GW, the data showed, a slight uptick from nearly 76 GW added in 2023.
The total installed capacity of solar and wind power were around 887 GW and 521 GW respectively.
President Xi Jinping set a target in 2020 for at least 1,200 GW of solar and wind capacity installed by 2030.
China surpassed that target last year, almost six years earlier than planned, data from the NEA showed in August.
It has also built almost twice as much wind and solar capacity as every other country combined, according to research published in July.
Beijing invested more than $50 billion in new solar supply capacity from 2011 to 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.
The solar industry has also benefited from access to cheap raw materials, readily available capital from state-owned banks and huge engineering manpower.
China remains heavily reliant on coal despite installing renewable energy capacity at record speed.
But there are signs it may be weaning itself off the fossil fuel.
Coal power permits fell 83 percent in the first half of last year and no new coal-based steelmaking projects were approved in the same period.
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Solar Energy
China battery giant CATL’s Hong Kong listing plan gathers steam
China battery giant CATL’s Hong Kong listing plan gathers steam
by AFP Staff Writers
Hong Kong (AFP) Jan 14, 2025
Chinese electric vehicle battery giant CATL is pushing ahead with plans to list in Hong Kong, with banks reportedly vying for a deal expected to raise at least $5 billion.
CATL, which produces more than a third of the EV batteries sold worldwide, said it plans to “seek a listing on the Main Board of Hong Kong Stock Exchange” in a bid to expand globally and support energy transition.
“This move is primarily aimed at creating an international financing platform to better support our global business development,” the firm told AFP on Tuesday.
“We have sufficient cash and funding for our overall business, and building up an international financing platform will be a strategic arrangement, which is in line with other globalised companies.”
CATL is publicly traded in Shenzhen and its plans for a secondary listing in Hong Kong were announced in an exchange filing last month.
Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, China International Capital Corporation and CSC Financial Corporation are poised to be the lead arrangers for the deal, Bloomberg News reported this week.
Other banks are likely to be added for a listing that could happen as soon as the first half of this year, which could raise at least $5 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Founded in 2011 in the eastern coastal Chinese city of Ningde, CATL has grown into the world’s largest EV battery maker and supplies firms including Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota, Honda and Hyundai.
Last week, the US Department of Defense added CATL to a list of companies it says are affiliated with Beijing’s military.
China has denounced the move as “suppression” while CATL said the company is “not engaged in any military related activities”.
CATL’s Shenzhen shares rose 3.8 percent on Tuesday but were still down nearly four percent since the start of the year.
Hong Kong’s stock exchange is eager for the return of big-name Chinese listings in hopes of regaining its crown as the world’s top IPO venue.
The Chinese finance hub has suffered a steady decline in new offerings since a regulatory crackdown by Beijing starting in 2020 led some Chinese mega-companies to put their plans on hold.
A bumper listing by Chinese electronic appliance maker Midea worth $4 billion last year may signal a turnaround, analysts say.
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Solar Energy
Unlocking the potential of lithium-sulfur batteries
Unlocking the potential of lithium-sulfur batteries
by Amber Rose for Argonne News
Lemont IL (SPX) Jan 14, 2025
Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are an integral part of society, from cellphones and laptops to electric vehicles. While Li-ion batteries have been a major success to date, scientists worldwide are racing to design even better ?”beyond Li-ion” batteries in the shift toward a more electrified world. Commercial Li-ion batteries are less energy-dense than alternative batteries and rely on relatively expensive substances, such as cobalt and nickel compounds, which are also heavily dependent on vulnerable supply chains.
One of the more promising alternatives to Li-ion batteries are lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries, which have an anode of lithium metal and a cathode of sulfur. This electrode pairing promises two to three times higher energy densities and reduced costs, while also using Earth-abundant resources.
But these batteries do not come without their own challenges, including a short cycle life due to the unwanted migration of polysulfide ions and the uneven distribution and occurrence of chemical reactions within the system.
By developing an innovative additive for the electrolyte, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are making progress toward addressing these problems that are limiting the widespread adoption of Li-S batteries.
In Li-ion batteries, lithium ions are stored in the spaces between layers of the cathode material and move back and forth between the cathode and anode during charging and discharging.
Li-S batteries, however, rely on a different process. In these cells, lithium ions move between the cathode and anode by a chemical reaction. Elemental sulfur from the cathode is converted into polysulfide compounds – composed of sulfur atom chains – some of which can dissolve in the electrolyte. Because of this solubility, a ?”shuttling” effect occurs, where the polysulfides travel back and forth between the cathode and the anode. This shuttling results in loss of material from the sulfur cathode because it is deposited at the anode, which limits the overall battery cycle life and performance.
Numerous strategies have been proposed to mitigate polysulfide shuttling and other challenges. One such strategy, using an additive in the electrolyte, has long been thought to be incompatible due to chemical reactivity with the sulfur cathode and other battery parts. Argonne chemist Guiliang Xu and his team have created a new class of additive and found that such additives can actually improve battery performance. By controlling the way the additive reacts with sulfur compounds, researchers are better able to create an interface between the cathode and electrolyte that is necessary to facilitate easy transport of lithium ions.
“The additive, called a Lewis acid additive, is a salt that reacts with the polysulfide compounds, forming a film over the entire electrode,” Xu said. ?”The key is to have a minor reaction to form the film, without a continuous reaction that consumes the material and reduces energy density.”
The additive forms a film on both the anode and the cathode, suppressing the shuttle effect, improving the stability of the cell and promoting an ion transport ?”highway” throughout the electrode. This electrolyte design also minimizes sulfur dissolution and enhances reaction homogeneity, enabling the use of additives that were previously considered incompatible.
To validate the concept, the researchers compared their electrolyte with the additive to a conventional electrolyte used in Li-S batteries. They observed a significant reduction in polysulfide formation. The new electrolyte showed very low dissolution of polysulfides, which was confirmed with X-ray techniques. Further, they tracked the reaction behavior during battery charging and discharging. These experiments made use of Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) and Brookhaven National Laboratory’s National Synchrotron Light Source II, both DOE Office of Science user facilities, which confirmed that the electrolyte design minimized the dissolution and formation of polysulfides.
“Synchrotron techniques provide powerful tools for characterizing battery materials,” said Tianyi Li, a beamline scientist at the APS. ?”By using X-ray diffraction, X-ray absorption spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence microscopy at the APS, it was confirmed that the new interface design effectively mitigates well-known issues including polysulfide shuttle. More importantly, this interface enhances ion transfer, which helps to reduce reaction heterogeneities.”
Xu added, ?”With further optimization and development of sulfur electrodes, we believe Li-S batteries can achieve higher energy density and better overall performance, contributing to their commercial adoption.”
Another major challenge for Li-S batteries is the stability of the lithium metal – it reacts easily and poses safety concerns. Xu and his team are working on developing better electrolytes to stabilize the lithium metal and reduce the flammability of the electrolyte, ensuring the safety of Li-S batteries.
At the APS, Beamline 20-BM was used for X-ray absorption spectroscopy to probe the solubility of polysulfide. Beamline 17-BM was used for X-ray diffraction imaging to explore the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the entire cell. Beamline 2-ID was used for X-ray fluorescence mapping to confirm solubility of the electrode material and to observe the migration of sulfur in conventional electrolytes.
Other contributors to this work include Chen Zhao, Heonjae Jeong, Inhui Hwang, Yang Wang, Jianming Bai, Luxi Li, Shiyuan Zhou, Chi Cheung Su, Wenqian Xu, Zhenzhen Yang, Manar Almazrouei, Cheng-Jun Sun, Lei Cheng and Khalil Amine.
The results of this research were published in Joule. The study was funded by the Vehicle Technologies Office of DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Research Report:Polysulfide-incompatible additive suppresses spatial reaction heterogeneity of Li-S batteries
Related Links
Argonne National Laboratory
Powering The World in the 21st Century at Energy-Daily.com
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