Professor Paul Dastoor from the University of Newcastle in NSW is celebrating the first commercial demonstration of a game-changing printed solar technology.
Together with a team of five people he has just installed a 200-square-metre sheet of solar panels, printed onto recycled plastic, on a factory rooftop.
And it only took them one day.
Dastoor said the installation is the first of its kind in Australia — possibly the world.
“The low cost and speed at which this technology can be deployed is exciting as we need to find solutions, and quickly, to reduce demand on base-load power,” Dastoor said.
How printed solar works
Printed solar is an ultra-lightweight material, similar in texture and flexibility to a potato chip packet. The panels deliver unprecedented affordability at a production cost of less than $10 per square metre.
We first reported on Dastoor’s work on developing organic solar printing in 2013.
Printed solar technology is not as efficient as silicon-based solar panels, and it degrades much faster. But Dastoor believes the low-cost of production and installation makes it competitive with traditional solar power.
The university’s lab-scale printer can produce hundreds of metres of solar sheeting each day. However, Dastoor said upgrading to commercial-scale printing would increase this output to kilometres per day.
“No other renewable technology can be manufactured as quickly,” he said.
The system is a lineal process. One rogue module can disrupt the output of the entire system. Dastoor said this is overcome by simply printing new cells to replace faulty ones.
The university team have doubled the efficiency of the system in just 12 months, and over the next 12 weeks expect to double output again.
In six months, the team will remove the pilot installation and recycle the material.
Buying solar power like mobile phone data
Dastoor envisions printed solar power changing the way we consume energy. Unlike conventional rooftop solar, which require significant upfront investment, he sees consumers buying printed solar on a pre-paid scheme.
“In future, we expect users might sign onto this energy solution in a similar way to a mobile phone plan. You determine your usage requirements, pay a monthly service fee, but never need to ‘own’ the infrastructure.
“This is quite a change in how we’ll think about energy provision and energy markets in the near future.”
