Corus Colors and Dyesol held their third milestone meeting for their collaborative project last Wednesday at the PV Accelerator. The companies are working together to develop product, processes and facilities that will produce Dye Solar Cells (DSC) integrated onto strip steel in a coil coating line.
The Welsh Assembly Government (WAG), who is providing financial support for the project, announced that the project was both on budget and exceeding performance schedules.
At the meeting, Dyesol and Corus presented the past quarter’s achievements, then conducted a facility tour to demonstrate Corus’s new continuous process pilot plant and Dyesol’s titania paste preparation plant. They also demonstrated advanced substrates designed to achieve the 25-year corrosion resistance specification for the product, successfully ahead of milestone requirements.
The companies’ new technology of steel roofing integrated with dye solar cells will be the first technology that can be grid competitive in typical light conditions in most cities around the world, compared to the full sun conditions required for other solar technologies. DSC technology boasts such advantages as exhibiting operating voltage stability throughout typical daily solar conditions, even clouds and haze, and less susceptibility to hot conditions than other solar technologies
Additionally, Dyesol has demonstrated through accelerated testing that DSC has an operating lifetime of more than the 25 years required for BIPV applications. It also requires little energy as well as relatively cheap materials for its production. These advantages proves DSC’s potential for application anywhere that steel roofing is utilized.
