1 week Ago By Dan Yoo
Stockholm, Sweden, and Puglia, Italy – Midsummer, a Swedish thin-film solar cell manufacturer, has been selected by the Italian Ministry of University and Research to join a consortium focused on developing a new solar cell called the “Quantum Dot CIGS/Perovskite Tandem.” This announcement was made on April 9. The "Quantum Dot Enhanced Lightweight Solar Cells" (QDELS) project aims to develop and validate an innovative production process for CIGS (Cu In Ga Se) solar cells with a tandem perovskite structure enhanced by quantum dots (QD).
The ultimate goal is to improve the efficiency of CIGS cells, enabling them to surpass the performance of conventional silicon cells across all parameters. To facilitate this development, Midsummer will receive a grant of approximately EUR 2.8 million from the Ministry of University and Research, covering work and materials used in the tests.
The project is scheduled to run for four years starting this autumn, with a total budget of EUR 7.5 million. Consorzio Hypatia and the National Research Council are also involved in this initiative.
Midsummer operates a subsidiary in Italy, Midsummer Italia, which runs Europe’s largest facility for the production of thin-film solar cells in Bari. This facility has received EUR 22 million in grants, primarily from the Italian investment authority Invitalia. However, the new R&D tandem cell project is entirely separate from the Bari factory project and its associated grants.
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