- Viperlab has opened the 6th call for perovskite-silicon research in the EU
- It is open to growing scientific perovskite communities, industry and SMEs
- Winners will get free access to Viperlab’s infrastructure to develop the projects at pre-industrial scale
Viperlab, a European Union funded Horizon 2020 project, has launched its 6th call inviting perovskite-silicon research projects to access its perovskite research infrastructure covering entire value chain, with an aim to enable rapid market entry of solar PV modules based on this technology.
Its labs are equipped with the entire innovation/value chain from material preparation to fabrication and characterization of perovskite devices and modules, and it is completely free for projects selected by the Viperlab team.
The call is open to projects where most of the research team is located in a European country, and those user groups that are able to scientifically disseminate results achieved with use of Viperlab facilities. It will also consider offering remote access to the winning projects.
Viperlab’s call is open to growing scientific perovskite communities, industry and SMEs to validate their perovskite silicon research work at pre-industrial scale as it sees the technology forming the ‘backbone for EU PV recovered worldwide leadership all along the value chain’.
The 6th call was launched earlier this year on January 2, 2023 with last date for proposal submission stated as February 28, 2023. Details are available on Viperlab’s website.
Viperlab states, “Perovskite PV hence have a huge potential to not only become a leading single junction PV technology for wide-spread solar energy conversion but also to boost existing PV technology by enabling efficient low-cost tandem solar cells. The mission of VIPERLAB is to facilitate faster and reliable technology evaluation cycles to enable a swift market entry for Perovskite-based PV products and hence a more wide-spread utilization of renewable energy conversion technology.”
Germany’s Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB) coordinated Viperlab counts Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), Belgium’s Becquerel Institute Belgium, France’s Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), Switzerland’s Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM), among some of its consoritum members.
As the global solar PV industry’s workhorse PERC comes to a saturation point and the world looking at TOPCon or heterojunction as its successors, it is perovskite as the next generation technology that the EU is eying to establish itself in with the HZB achieving 32.5% efficiency for perovskite silicon tandem cells (see HZB Reports 32.5% Efficiency For Tandem Solar Cells).
Efforts are now in motion to establish a commercial production capacity for this technology. HZB and Qcells are working on the Pepperoni project comprising an EU funded industrial tandem solar cell line on pilot basis. Meyer Burger too has joined hands with CSEM, HZB, Fraunhofer ISE and Stuttgart University to industrialize this technology (see Meyer Burger Strikes Strategic Partnerships For Tandem Technology).
