22.09.2020
The company was invited to speak at the Cleantech Innovation Symposium held on 30 September.
As the EU Green Deal moves from policy to procurement, symposia of this kind bring together the technologies that will have to deliver it in practice.
More coverage is collected under press; the technology itself is described on the project page.
Related material: the project, press coverage and the collaborators behind the technology.
Power generated on a greenhouse roof is usually consumed on site. Climate control, irrigation pumps, ventilation and supplementary lighting all draw during the same daylight hours when the glazing produces, so much of the output never touches the grid.
That self-consumption is what makes the economics work. Electricity used where it is generated is worth the retail price rather than the feed-in tariff, and it avoids both transmission losses and the connection queues that hold up ground-mounted projects.
A working solar cell is only the beginning. To become glazing it has to be laminated between sheets of architectural glass, sealed at the edges, and made to survive decades of thermal cycling, humidity and hail while keeping its optical properties.
It also has to be installable by the people who build greenhouses today, using the profiles and methods they already use. A product that demands a new trade to install it will not spread, whatever its performance on paper.