The social, economical and environmental impact
The project,The project includes aspects related to both applicative and fundamental research, bringing new results at top level on material synthesis, device processing and characterization. Besides the breakthrough long-term vision contained in this proposal, i.e. the perspective of mastering the growth and exploiting the properties of these dilute nitride alloys towards solar energy harvesting with high efficiency at reduced costs, the solid grounds prepared by N-IBCell will be of great interest both for the scientific community, the general public and policy makers, as well as existing industry and investors. We thus aim to disseminate the project and our results to various target groups.
The project will contribute to increase the level of knowledge and skills available to the Norwegian and Romanian academia and industry in these technology fields, all this representing a significant advantage towards the worldwide competition. The partners will ensure effective and timely exploitation of the technologies and capabilities that are developed. They will identify opportunities to publicize the achievements and capabilities that will be developed with potential users in academia and industry, as well as the wider Norwegian, Romanian and international public.
Estimated improvements in the quality of life, with respect to current performance of products, technologies and/or services.
The project results lead to the improvements in the quality of life under different aspects (social, economical and environmental) and on different time perspective.
On short term, the development of high efficiency PV cells by a cost-effective technology will stimulate the industrial progress and the economical growth by encouraging investment in this field, leading to large scale production technology implementation. That will generate new jobs, reducing the social problems of this nature. The low acquisition costs of high efficiency solar cells will facilitate the implementation of small scale PV systems for small communities which lives on non-electrified regions thereby improving the quality of life. On medium term, the implementation of large PV farms will ensure the security of energy supply by a less energy dependence on the fossil fuels sources.
On long term, the development of high efficiency PV farms will ensure environment conservation which will have a major effect on the quality of life. Every KWh produced by PV systems reduces by roughly 1kg the amount of CO2 gas emitted to the atmosphere [25].
Comparing the features of existing PV systems on the market with the project outcomes, it can be emphasized the following advantages of this new and innovative technology:
- the conversion efficiency could reach 50% and beyond compared with roughly 40% of existing photovoltaic systems on the market;
- High efficiency III-V intermediate band solar cells, particularly InGaN-based and dilute-nitride-based IB solar cells, are suitable for replacing the actual III-V semiconductor tandem cells in high concentration PV, reducing thus considerably the costs at no loss in efficiency.
- It is expected a longer lifetime of InGaN-based PV cells, ~ 30 years, due to very good chemical and aging stability of the InGaN material;
- The proposed InGaN-based and GaInNAs-based IBSCs are also suitable for space applications due to their radiation hardness (the optical quality of GaInNAs alloys even improves upon irradiation with 7 MeV electrons to fluences of 1015 electrons/cm2 – a typical fluence for electron irradiation to test the End of Life capability of space solar cells), which may lead to a longer life time of GaInN-based and GaInNAs-based solar cells for space applications.
- the proposed InGaN-based technology is non-polluting;
- the proposed technology allows industrial scale production.
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