Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This project addresses renewable energy sources, and builds on existing Canadian capability to develop the world's most efficient photovoltaic cells for solar energy systems. By building on expertise gathered in the Canadian high-tech sector over the past 10-20 years, this project enables two university groups (Universityof Ottawa and l'université de Sherbrooke) to further their existing collaborations with Ottawa-based Cyrium Technologies. Cyrium are commercially manufacturing their QDEC product with a minimum efficiency of 38%, as well as high-performance production solar cells exceeding ~40% efficiency. The project aims to take this excellent result and improve it by as much as 10 per cent, so that photovoltaic systems using these devices will be able to deliver substantially more electricity for a given amount of illumination, and thus more economically. It will do this by going beyond the existing 3-junction cells to a new 4-junction structure that also uses integrated quantum well nanostructures developed using an advanced form of materials growth called 'Chemical Beam Epitaxy' (CBE). CBE is an attractive process for making these devices because it can transfer very readily to a scalable manufacturing environment. The researchers working on this project will experience all the steps from device design to manufacture and system testing in an industrial environment, and will emerge from the project activity as highly-sought-after HQP skills in an exciting and expanding market sector (currently growing at 25%/year). The project has the potential to eliminate up to 60 tons of CO2 emissions per year per average building, and will enable economical power solutions for on-grid and off-grid consumers around the world. The team plans to use this project to follow on from their very successful SUNRISE project and also to complement the existing Provincially-supported APECS project at uOttawa.