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POLAND: And if one day all buildings could be equipped with windows and facades that would meet all the energy needs of the structure, rain or shine?
This dream of sustainability is about to become a reality thanks to the Polish physicist and businesswoman Olga Malinkiewicz.
The 36-year-old has developed a new ink jet treatment process for perovskites – a new generation of cheaper solar cells – that can produce low-temperature solar panels, dramatically reducing energy costs. costs.
Indeed, perovskite technology is set to revolutionize access to solar energy for all, given its surprising physical properties, according to some experts.
"According to us, perovskite solar cells have the potential to solve the problem of energy poverty in the world," said Mohammad Khaja Nazeeruddin, professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, an institution at the forefront of research on solar energy.
The mineral-coated solar panels are light, flexible, efficient, inexpensive and come in different shades and degrees of transparency.
They can easily be fixed on almost any surface (laptops, cars, drones, space vehicles or buildings) to produce electricity, even in the shade or in the interior.
Although this enthusiasm is new, perovskite has been known to science since at least the 1830s, when it was first identified by the German mineralogist Gustav Rose while she was prospecting in the mountains of Ural and bore the name of the Russian mineralogist Lev Perovski.
In the following decades, the synthesis of the atomic structure of perovskite became easier.
But it was only in 2009 that Japanese researcher Tsutomu Miyasaka discovered that perovskites can be used to form photovoltaic solar cells.
– & # 39; Beef Eye & # 39; –
At first, the process was complicated and required extremely high temperatures, so that only materials that could withstand extreme heat – such as glbad – could be covered with perovskite cells.
That's where Malinkiewicz intervenes.
In 2013, while she was still a PhD student at the University of Valencia in Spain, she discovered a way to cover a flexible sheet of perovskites using an evaporation method.
Later, she developed an inkjet printing procedure that sufficiently reduced production costs to make mbad production cost-effective.
"It was a punch.Now, it is no longer necessary to withstand high temperatures to cover objects with a photovoltaic layer," Malinkiewicz told AFP.
His discovery quickly earned him an article in the journal Nature and Media Attention, as well as the Photonics21 Student Innovation Award as part of a competition organized by the European Commission.
The Polish edition of MIT Technology Review also selected it as one of its Innovators under 35 in 2015.
She then founded the company Saule Technologies – named after the Baltic Sun Goddess – with two Polish businessmen.
They had to bademble all their laboratory equipment from scratch, before Japanese multi-million investor Hideo Sawada hit the road.
The company now has an ultramodern laboratory with an international team of young experts and is currently building a production site on an industrial scale.
"This will be the world's first production line using this technology, with capacity reaching 40,000 square meters by the end of the year and 180,000 square meters the next year," Malinkiewicz told his lab.
"But it's only a drop in the bucket in terms of demand."
Ultimately, compact production lines could easily be installed anywhere, depending on demand, for the manufacture of custom made perovskite solar panels.
– Autonomous buildings –
The Swedish construction group Skanska is testing the high-tech panels on the facade of one of its buildings in Warsaw.
It also signed a licensing agreement with Saule in December for the exclusive right to integrate the company's solar cell technology into its projects in Europe, the United States and Canada.
"Perovskite technology brings us closer to the goal of energy-efficient buildings," said Adam Targowski, Sustainable Development Manager, Skanska.
"Perovskites have proven themselves even on surfaces with little sunlight, and we can apply them everywhere," he told AFP.
"More or less transparent, the panels also meet the design requirements.By their flexibility and their varied hues, it is not necessary to add additional architectural elements."
A standard panel of about 1.3 square meters, with a projected cost of 50 euros, would provide a day of energy to a workstation, according to current estimates.
Malinkiewicz insists that the initial cost of its products will be comparable to that of conventional solar panels.
Perovskite technology is also tested in a hotel in Japan, near the city of Nagasaki.
Projects are also under way for the pilot production of perovskite panels in Valais,
Switzerland and Germany under the wings of Oxford Photovoltaics.
"The potential of the technology is clearly huge," AFP Assaad Razzouk, CEO of Singapore-based Sindicatum Rewable Energy, developer and operator of clean energy projects in Asia, told AFP.
"Just think of all the buildings that we could renovate around the world!"
France Media Agency
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