Charles W. Thurston
Solar Window Technologies has secured a manufacturing agreement for the coating of its organic photovoltaic solar generation liquid on glass windows that will produce electricity on all four sides of commercial buildings.
This first regional production agreement is with Triview Glass
Industries, based in Los Angeles, California. Triview, which has
12 production lines, is specialized in tempered, laminated, and
insulated glass products.
Columbia, Maryland-based Solar Window will seek to raise
capital over the next six months for equipment and working
capital at the Triview location.
Solar Window, which is publicly traded, does not indicate
exactly what materials it uses in its coating, nor how much
electricity its coating will produce. The company also relies
on its own projections to calculate economic feasibility. Part
of the formula the company uses to calculate the relative
performance of its product is the large area of glass on a
building, which it compares with a small rooftop footprint
for economic viability. The company did not respond to a
request for further clarification.
Among earlier SolarWindow product tests, the liquid coatings were applied to Corning Willow Glass and “laminated under conditions that simulate the high pressure and temperatures
of the manufacturing processes used by commercial glass and
window producers,” the company said. The Corning experiment
resulted in a bendable glass veneer, as thin as a business card,
that generates electricity, it said.
SolarWindow claims that its products could reduce electric-
ity demand by 30-50 percent in tall buildings and provide a
one-year financial payback. According to an “independently-
validated engineering modeling,” that is not identified. The
coatings convert passive windows and other materials into
electricity generators under natural, artificial, low, shaded, and
reflected light conditions.
The company has made 14 patent filings for its technology, under development since 2009. The U.S. Department of
Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory has helped in
the R&D process. NREL’s National Center for Photovoltaics
has research capabilities in organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells,
transparent conducting oxides, combinatorial methods, molecular simulation methods, and atmospheric processing, the
lab description says.
NREL said that OPV is a “rapidly emerging PV technol-
ogy with improving cell efficiency – currently about 13.2
percent, encouraging initial lifetime – greater than 5,000
hours unencapsulated, and potential for roll-to-roll manu-
facturing processes.”
In April NREL reported progress on a different solar coating,
involving a perovskite ink with a longer processing window that
it suggests would allow for the scalable production of perovskite
thin films for high-efficiency solar cells. The perovskite solution
can be applied using either spin-coating or blade-coating meth-
ods, the laboratory reported.
The potential market for the commercial application of solar
windows is massive. The company cites government statistics
indicating that commercial buildings consume 40 percent of all
the electricity generated in the United States, at a cost of over
$140 billion. Market analyst IDTechEx forecasted that the OPC
market will rise from a few million dollars today to $630 million by 2022.
The building-integrated PV market may find OPV especially
attractive because of the availability of absorbers in several different colors. Work also is underway at NREL on glass that
darkens quickly as sunlight increases. CW
SolarWindow Sets
Manufacturing Deal
for Solar Coating
