Apartnership between graduate- level engineering students and a solar energy business is workingon advancing the efficiency of photovoltaics.
In New Mexico, Advent Solar Inc. ofAlbuquerque has found a home withinSkySong, Arizona State University’s business incubator in Scottsdale. At SkySong,alongside ASU engineering students, thecompany’s own engineers are working onAdvent Solar’s Ventura technology, whichputs an emitter wrap-through back-contactcell into a monolithic module assembly.
The module uses low-cost manufacturing
techniques from the semiconductor indus-
try, noted Peter Green, president and CEO
of Advent Solar. The cell-to-module
architecture means that the function of a
single cell now can be addressed. Green
explained, “If one cell is shaded or
impacted, we can address it at the individ-
ual cell level.”
The team is developing the module and
the software control, which will monitor
its function without human interface.
Green is confident in his partnership
with ASU. “They’re quite a sustainability
engine,” he said, noting that the university
offers what was the nation’s first degree
program in sustainability. ;
anne.fischer@laurin.com
Competing for market
Lighting, solar energy and self-suffi-ciency are important aspects of the competition, but also critical is how the designwill fare on the market, and the houses arejudged on that as well. In addition totrying to win in marketability, some teamsalready have plans for the homes afterthey are hauled back to campus. The RiceUniversity team’s home, called the“Ze-Row House,” was designed to bereplicable and to fit into a neighborhoodof row houses in Houston. Knowing thatthe home would have to be comfortablefor a family in Houston’s high-heat, high-humidity climate added challenge to theteam’s engineering efforts.
The students gain much from partici-
pating in the Solar Decathlon, but noth-
ing more significant, according to BAC’s
Stein, than an understanding of the
consequences of our own actions. He
points to the Nike slogan, “Just Do It,”
which he said students have come to
oppose. Instead they’ve learned that what
works in terms of designing places for
people to live is to “just think about it,
just consider its consequences, just work
out its funding, just understand how to
construct it, just imagine how people
will feel around it for the next few gener-
ations, [and] just imagine how to solve
for the future.”
The competition takes place every two
years and is sponsored by the US Depart-
ment of Energy, which awards $100,000
to each team for design and construction
costs. A European Solar Decathlon will
take place in Madrid, Spain, in 2010. ;
anne.fischer@laurin.com
PV partnership in Arizona
As part of a business-university partnership,a solar technologyengineer performs aquality control checkon silicon designedfor Advent Solar Inc.’sVentura technology,which is being developed at Arizona StateUniversity’s SkySongbusiness incubator.
