Green energy technology company High Yield Energy Technologies (HyET) Group from the Netherlands has entered a 4-year research contract with Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) to work on introducing flexible, thin-film silicon solar PV technology in the form of a foil, called Powerfoil.
HyET Group has Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) of Australia as 60% stakeholder. In December 2021, both the companies started a design study for a Powerfoil fab with 1 GW capacity to be set up in Australia (see FFI Acquires Majority Stake In Dutch HyET Group).
Meanwhile, HyET Solar plans to build a new production facility in Arnhem with 40 MW annual capacity. The company says deploying roll-to-roll production process, it can shell our up to 30-meter long solar modules and its shape can be customized. Powerfoil can open up new markets for solar energy deployment that cannot be served by existing inflexible and heavy glass panels.
"New materials, device architectures and processing steps developed in our university lab will soon be applied in current and future production lines at HyET Solar," said Professor Arno Smets of TU Delft.
HyET Solar says it has developed a proprietary production process to produce lightweight and thin film solar cells on long foil substrates in a number of roll-to-roll steps. Along with making the manufacturing process simpler and easier, the end product can be used for utility scale, industrial as well as residential applications.
The current efficiency of Powerfoil can go up to 12% with 2 active layers of amorphous/microcrystalline Si in tandem junction, but according to HyET's roadmap, it aims to produce triple junction product with an efficiency of 26% using amorphous/microcrystalline/SiGe configuration.