A Better Path for Solar PV with PI Energy
With this update, we are addressing two important questions:
What is the composition of the PI Energy solar cell?
Why is our team confident in the future success of the technology?
PI Energy is a leading solar materials innovation company. We are leveraging a proven material and configuring it in a new and better way.
We use silicon, the same element found in over 92% of solar modules made globally during 2021. Silicon is earth-abundant, durable, and non-toxic; and as a solar PV material, it optimally matches the solar spectrum.
Silicon PV is a well-proven technology, though the current (traditional) silicon PV requires a lot of energy to produce, and results in a relatively thick and heavy module, which increases total costs and limits where it can be installed.
With PI Energy’s technology, we have adapted silicon PV to make it ultra-thin, about 1/50th of the traditional thickness and weight, which results in an ultra-flexible PV film material.
We designed our technology to be scalable, capable of a global ramp-up, with a manufacturing process that uses fabrication hardware currently in use for other industries. This significantly lowers the energy and materials (by about 1/50th) for production, lowering the costs and carbon footprint of solar energy.
PI Energy’s technology uses a proprietary light-trapping layer within its ultra-thin film, that leverages the advantages of silicon PV and enables new applications for solar energy.
Cross sectional diagram of traditional c-Si and PI Energy
Our team, comprising physicists, engineers, and energy sector veterans, draws its confidence in PI Energy’s technology from the intrinsic advantages over traditional solar PV, which include:
Combining the reliability of traditional c-silicon PV, with the flexibility of thin-film PV.
Allowing solar PV to be installed on most surfaces, vastly expanding where and how solar energy can be installed and utilized.
Apple did not invent the smartphone and Tesla did not invent electric cars. They made each product far better and transformed their markets. PI Energy is creating a next-generation solar PV technology to take solar energy to the next level, leveraging the best that exists today and making it far better, even more competitive, and practical in current and exciting new applications.