In early September Valencia hosted the 25th edition of the European conference on photovoltaic solar energy (PV, or solar power). This year, the European conference was combined with the American and Asian conferences into a global conference for the fifth time. The result was a huge event with a total of 38,000 participants in the conference and visitors to the exhibition that was held simultaneously. The 4,500 conference visitors could choose from 1,400 presentations in the form of lectures and posters. Some 1,000 companies presented themselves at the fair, including 35 Dutch firms.
The enormous scale of this conference demonstrates that solar power has become a fully fledged industry. This is also revealed by the fact that the largest companies in the world, such as Samsung, Sharp, Panasonic, General Electric, Siemens and others attended this exhibition.
The chairman of the conference, Giovanni Federigo De Santi, director of the Petten Institute for Energy (IE) of the European Commission, expressed the development of PV as follows: “This World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion confirmed our expectations that photovoltaics is developing globally in the right direction. With the targets as declared so far by its Member States, in the year 2020 the European Union would cover an estimated 3% of electricity consumption by PV solar energy. Similar ambitious plans are being brought forward in the US, Japan, India as well as in China. My vision to reach by 2020 a worldwide installed PV solar capacity, equivalent to about 2% of the total electricity demand, seems to be not unrealistic.”
Global Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition in Valencia Attracts 38,000 visitors
During the conference IE also published a status overview of market trends and expectations for solar power. The PV market grew by more than 50% even though 2009 was a year of financial crisis. It is expected that growth in 2010 will be even higher and that annual sales will total around €40 billion.
Dutch successes
Various Dutch companies issued press releases during the exhibition. Tempress from Vaassen, for example, secured $37 million worth of new orders, bringing the total value of orders in 2010 to $157 million. Tempress is therefore the global leader in a segment of the production machinery market.
Solland published a press release about the partnership with the German company Schott Solar for pilot production of the new Sunweb technology in Heerlen. Scheuten Solar also unveiled new types of PV modules with improved performance by using glass that absorbs less light, for example.
ECN was able to announce the important and long-awaited news that its world record module technology has been certified by TÜV. Obtaining the IEC 61215 certificate demonstrates that the technology has successfully passed an entire series of stringent tests. A key requirement for actual production and application has therefore been met.
Moving and inspiring
During the opening session of the conference, the auditorium packed with thousands of people listened to Bertrand Piccard from Switzerland in complete silence. Piccard comes from a well-known family and also boasts an impressive record of service himself. His grandfather was the first person to reach the stratosphere in a balloon, while his father was the first to descend to the deepest ocean trench. Bertrand himself was the first person to circumnavigate the world in a balloon. He is currently working on an aircraft powered by solar cells that will allow him once again to be the first person to circumnavigate the globe non-stop. He succeeded in moving and inspiring his audience with an impassioned plea full of clever parallels between scientific pioneers around the world in order to ensure sustainable energy use and encourage personal pioneers to do something completely new and challenging.
Plasmons and a new record
The conference naturally also yielded many new aspects relating to science, technology and the application of solar power. Here are some highlights in which the Netherlands is involved. Director Albert Polman of the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam was one of the first to deliver an impressive lecture on an entirely new method for trapping light in ultra-thin solar cells. This method is based on nanotechnology (with the use of ‘plasmons’). A great deal still has to be done to translate the fundamental insights into usable technologies, but it is promising and FOM and ECN have been working together closely in this field for some time.
In high-yield solar cells, the quality of material surfaces is very important. Up until now, not all surfaces could be handled with industrial processes. A few years ago, researchers from TU Eindhoven unveiled outstanding results obtained via atomic layer deposition, a technology that up until then was not deemed feasible for large-scale production. However, two Dutch companies, Levitech and SoLayTec, have developed (prototype) devices that can apply the required surface layer to the cells very quickly; an elegant and ingenious method. The first results for industrial cells were revealed during a special session on this topic. ECN is working on integrating these layers within cell technologies and is therefore bringing new high-yield concepts within reach.
Last but not least, ECN presented its world-record module efficiency to the great interest of everyone present: 17.0% for a module based on rear-contact cells and a new method for connecting cells to one another electrically. It emerged during the conference, incidentally, that Schott Solar now holds the record with a module efficiency of 17.6%, indicative of how quickly developments occur in the field.
Contact
Jan Bultman
ECN Solar Energy, Programme Manager
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