New UK Roadmap for Solar Energy
Jon Major and Ken Durose from Condensed Matter Physics have been involved in creating a new Roadmap for sustainable energy conversion. The project is a UK-wide operation with academic and industrial stakeholders contributing to a wide-ranging appraisal of the state of the art and opportunities for all kinds of future photovoltaic (PV) materials and devices. It covers every possible technology option, starting by pointing to the future for existing silicon and thin film PV before invoking the opportunities in new and emerging situations. While utility-scale and rooftop solar are very familiar, ‘agrivoltaics’ will be new to many readers. The concept is to take advantage of the huge acreage of greenhouse buildings used in food production and to use them for solar PV. Since plants only use a fraction of the available light for photosynthesis there is an opportunity to develop semi-transparent PV that can be deployed on existing agri-building stock. The Roadmap leaves no stone unturned: while you may have a pocket calculator with a small amorphous silicon panel, the indoor PV market is forecast to go much further than that in future. In particular, our homes are all set to be controlled remotely – don’t think John Cooper-Clarke and ‘The Day My Pad Went Mad’ - this is ‘The Internet of Things’ – a much more convenient future. The low powers required for the switching will easily be achievable from indoor PV, and the markets for it will be easier to enter than for utility-scale solar electricity. Of course, the major opportunities for CO2 reduction and clean power will remain with solar farms and rooftops, and the Roadmap will give you the latest news on perovskite tandem PV which has the ambition of challenging the supremacy of single-junction PV. You can read all about it in the Arxiv preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19430 ‘Roadmap on Photovoltaic Absorber Materials for Sustainable Energy’.