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Konarka Acheives 6% Efficiency for Organic Solar PV Cells

December 10, 2008 | 2 Comments

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Massachusetts, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com] Konarka Technologies Inc., announced that the National Energy Renewable Laboratory (NREL) has verified that the material class within Konarka's portfolio of flexible organic based photovoltaic (PV) solar cells has demonstrated 6% efficiency performance.

"Achieving the power conversion efficiency of 6% for this relatively young material class is an important milestone."

-- Dr. Alan Heeger, the University of California, Santa Barbara

"Achieving the power conversion efficiency of 6% for this relatively young material class is an important milestone," said Dr. Alan Heeger, Konarka's chief scientist. "Increasing the efficiency and performance of organic based photovoltaic (PV) solar cells at this rate is bringing us closer to making solar electricity from photovoltaics cost-competitive with conventional forms of electricity."

The results were achieved by Dr. Heeger as part of the Sustainable Development Technology Canada program, which provides funding to partners Université Laval, the National Research Council of Canada and Saint Jean Photochimie for the development of low cost printable organic solar cells. Konarka is the program's U.S. industrial solar cell partner.

Konarka has collaborated with the group for the past four years, and recently obtained the exclusive license for a new family of photoactive polymers called polycarbazoles (PCZ). Dr. Heeger integrated the material into his cell architecture and has advanced the performance, as verified by NREL.

Solar Energy

2 Reader Comments

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dennis-markatos

December 10, 2008

Keep it up, Konarka!
We need those solar costs to fall at least 25% in the years ahead. For some details, see:
http://setenergy.org/2008/12/04/solar-price-falling-slowly-natural-gas-continues-slide/

Onwards to sustainability,
Dennis

Comment
2 of 2

david-doty-31004

December 12, 2008

Why are they afraid to publish any meaningful details? Presumably, these experimental results were again on small glass or molybdenum slides, not on flexible substrates. Most certainly, they were not by a roll-to-roll process and were very small cells. Their lifetime under normal exposure conditions would probably be similar to their previous results, a few years. They've been saying for quite some time they would soon be producing organic PV material at low cost in large quantity by a roll-to-roll process. My estimate (see http://dotyenergy.com/Markets/PV_Solar.htm ) is that they won't get below $10/W in cells with 10 year lifetime for more than a decade. If they have some real data that shows promise, they should be proud of it and release it.

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