Energy Dept – $46.2M for 48 Projects to Advance Solar Power Technologies

Some favorites:

- "Two-Dimensional Material Based Layer Transfer for Low-Cost, High-Throughput, High-Efficiency Solar Cells" -- could finally make gallium arsenide thin film cells cheap. (Alta Devices thought it had solved this, but didn't and pivoted toward cost-insensitive customers. Worth another try.)

- "Fault Tolerant, Shade Tolerant High Voltage PV Modules" -- could produce silicon-based modules that are more durable and perform better under non-ideal conditions. Doesn't require drastic technology changes but could bring modules' average annual energy yield closer to the ideal.

- "Isovalent Alloying and Heterovalent Substitution for Super-efficient Halide Perovskite PV Solar Cells", "Low-Cost Scaffold-Reinforced Perovskite Solar Modules with Integrated Light Management", "Perovskite on Silicon Tandem Solar Cells" -- perovskite materials have the potential to be the first new commercially viable thin-film solar material in 20 years. If tandems with crystalline silicon can be commercialized they could beat the 1-junction Shockley–Queisser efficiency limit and become the first ever multi-junction cells cheap enough for terrestrial use.

- "Direct Metallization with Reactive Inks – Assessment of Reliability and Process Sensitivities", "Electroplated Aluminum - An Alternative to Copper or Silver Electrode in Silicon Solar Cells" -- both projects aim to reduce/replace use of silver for cell contacts. Silver is the only material-scarcity bottleneck at present for scaling silicon PV up to the terawatt-per-year manufacturing level.

And a few (IMO) poor choices: SolarReserve, Echogen Power Systems, and Solar Dynamics will develop new concentrating systems and new thermal energy storage materials for concentrating solar thermal technology. Give up already on this dead end. Compared to PV, solar thermal costs more, has higher mechanical complexity, works in fewer locations, consumes more water, and needs more land per unit of energy delivered. The one theoretical advantage over PV -- after-dark power via thermal energy storage -- is rapidly being erased by source-agnostic electricity storage.