Financial

A Swansea University-led project which will help communities in developing countries to generate their own solar power has been awarded £800,000 by the UK government. The money will be used to construct prototype buildings and support collaboration between experts from five countries – India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, South Africa, and the UK.

While perovskite solar cells should be cheap to produce, use widely-available materials and be flexible with the ability to be printed directly onto a base, the task taken on is to show that this technology can be manufactured and used effectively on actual buildings in developing countries. This is where the SUNRISE project and this new funding comes in.

An HZB team has successfully raised funds from the “Helmholtz European Partnering Program” of the Helmholtz Association to expand cooperation with partners of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The topics of the cooperation are tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon and, in particular, their precise characterization.

The TAPAS project is funded by the Helmholtz European Partnering programme for the next three years with 250,000 euros per year each. Following an evaluation, the funding period can be extended by two years. The Helmholtz European Partnering programme was set up to strengthen the European research area, in particular cooperation with countries in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe.