Combining Research And Business Into An Innovative Start-Up
Absolicon Solar Concentrator Ab from Sweden is a company which was born out of research conducted by the Royal Institute of Technology and various other universities and grew into a well funded business. The Nordic countries are well known for investing heavily into education and university research; but research alone is not enough if it's not transformed into a commercial product. Good that Absolicon was able to make that jump and pursue a largely untapped niche.
Suntrica Keeps Your Gadgets Charged
Suntrica Oy was one of the companies we visited during the Finnfacts Cleantech Blogger Tour 09, and who handed us out an actual product for testing, the SolarStrap. The tech savvy person has usually a few gadgets on him - cellphone, smart phone, PDA, MP3 Player, GPS, etc. - and at some point might run into the problem of an empty battery. That's no problem if an outlet & charger are at hand, but what if on the go and none of these are available?
Crystalsol Is Getting Ready To Revolutionize Solar Energy
Solar energy is a favourite of many governments and environmentalists: free and easy to harness energy from the sun - what's not to like about that? Well, for one the production of conventional photovoltaic panels isn't without environmental impacts, and it also uses rare metals which are increasingly difficult to source. Crystalsol, established in 2008 as a spin-off of the Tallinn University of Technology, is developing a product which gets rid of these negatives.
The company's key innovation is the use of tiny semiconductor crystals made of copper, zinc, tin and sulfo-selenide, CZTS for short, where each crystal works as a tiny solar cell. This technology is the combination of decades of research for the Russian military and Philips semiconductor know-how dating back to the 1960s. The result: a new type of flexible photovoltaic module with a significant cost advantage compared to all currently known photovoltaic technologies. The modules are produced roll-to-roll - think paper manufacturing - which eliminates the scale-up issues that thin film producers usually face. Once production is up and running, which should be by mid 2011, Crystalsol forecasts production costs below €0.50 per watt, which should give them the lead in low cost PV modules.
