{"id":269,"date":"2024-05-07T00:01:15","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T00:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/2024\/05\/07\/optigon-seizing-bright-solar-future-0506\/"},"modified":"2024-05-07T00:01:15","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T00:01:15","slug":"optigon-seizing-bright-solar-future-0506","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/2024\/05\/07\/optigon-seizing-bright-solar-future-0506\/","title":{"rendered":"Seizing solar\u2019s bright future"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation\u2019s electricity demands by 2050.<\/p>\n

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That\u2019s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,\u201d says Dane deQuilettes, the company\u2019s co-founder and chief science officer. \u201cThe technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.\u201d<\/p>\n

With roots in MIT\u2019s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.<\/p>\n

Beyond silicon<\/strong><\/p>\n

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.<\/p>\n

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon\u2019s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.<\/p>\n

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.<\/p>\n

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,\u201d says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe \u201921. \u201cWe wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material\u2019s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,\u201d says Brandon Motes \u201921, ME \u201922, co-founder and chief technical officer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,\u201d says Troupe.<\/p>\n

This streamlined system takes measurements \u201cin the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,\u201d says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. \u201cOptigon\u2019s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Berry, Optigon\u2019s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. \u201cIf Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,\u201d he says. \u201cThis could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.\u201d<\/p>\n

Measuring makes the difference<\/strong><\/p>\n

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring\u2019s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT\u2019s GridEdge Solar Research Program.<\/p>\n

Led by Vladimir Bulovi\u0107, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts\u00a0to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThere were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.\u201d Recognizing the group\u2019s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.<\/p>\n

\u201cForty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,\u201d says deQuilettes. \u201cWe started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,\u201d says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, \u201cOur goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, \u201cwith sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,\u201d says Motes. \u201cWe have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photovoltaics is just the start<\/strong><\/p>\n

The company may have already found its market niche. \u201cA research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,\u201d says Troupe, and according to Motes, \u201cPotential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.\u201d deQuilettes says, \u201cOur hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT\u2019s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,\u201d says deQuilettes. \u201cWe\u2019re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. \u201cWe\u2019ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we\u2019ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,\u201d deQuilettes says. \u201cIf we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO2 <\/sub>[carbon<\/sub>dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team has written scale into its business plan. \u201cWe want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,\u201d says Motes. \u201cWe envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It\u2019s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there\u2019s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86,137,585,581,582,296,501,584,406,79,583,505,580,121,502],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}