How printed solar PV will power a Tesla road trip around Australia

How do you demonstrate the flexibility and real world energy generation potential of printed solar technology?

Print out long sheets of flexible solar panels, roll them up, throw them in the boot of a Tesla and drive for 84 days and 15,097km around the entire coastline of Australia, unrolling the solar sheets along the way to use for off-grid charging.

This, at least, is how a team from Australia’s University of Newcastle, in partnership with UK company Charging Around Britain, is hoping to showcase the organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology it has been developing as a low-cost, lightweight and flexible alternative to conventional, silicon-based solar panels.

Professor Paul Dastoor and his team at the Centre for Organic Electronics at the University of Newcastle, have pioneered the development of water-based solar paint, which can be printed at high speed and low cost – for as little as $US8 a square meter – using basic roll to roll processing techniques.

The printable solar cells draw on advances in perovskite solar cell technologies, much of which is being advanced by Australian research institutions, that promise low cost, adaptable solar power applications, including integration into the surfaces of buildings or electric vehicles.

Dastoor believes the technology, which he says is at the beginning of its development, offers immense potential for taking solar power generation to a whole new level as the world seeks to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

“The OPV solar sheets are flexible, lightweight and tensile, and because they are printed, production costs are extremely low. In addition, they are produced using plastic materials that can be easily recycled,” the UoN website explains.

The Charge Around Australia project, which is scheduled to start in September 2022 after delays due to Coronavirus, will use the technology to harvest energy from the sun in remote stretches along the route where conventional charging methods are unavailable.

Project director Stuart McBain, from Charging Around Britain, says the printed solar panels will take around six hours a day to fully recharge the car, using only the energy from the sun, instead of from the grid.

As the chart below illustrates, this will deliver benefits in the form of both reduced cost and reduced emissions.

The STEM Roadshow, as it is also being called, will visit remote, regional schools and communities across six Australian states and territories, explaining the science behind the technology and showing students how to build their own plastic solar cells using non-toxic, risk-free materials.

“The project will demonstrate the capability of the portable solar panels to function successfully on this challenging trip and consequently help to dispel the ‘range anxiety’ currently associated with long-distance journeys in electric vehicles,” the website says.

And while organisers concede that this particular application of printed solar may not take off – “It wouldn’t be practical for everyone to carry hundreds of square metres of solar panels in their boot!” – it’s a great way to raise awareness of the technology.

“Printed solar is much more likely to be deployed on the big flat rooftops of factories, or along the edges of remote roads,” said Dr Benjamin Vaughan from the University of Newcastle’s OPV team, in comments on the project late last year.

The University of Newcastle’s solar cell innovations have previously been used in a commercial deployment at a CHEP logistics hub near Newcastle. And in mid-2020, the printed solar sheets were integrated into public shade structures by the Lane Cove Council in Sydney’s lower North Shore.

The main technological challenge for the technology, currently, is to increase the harvesting percentage efficiency – and the team believes that improvements in the printing processes can increase the efficiency of the product.

To this end, the researchers are working with Roto Hybrid printing technology expert Mark Jones, who believes the roll to roll printing process typically used in the printing and packaging of consumer goods could provide a major step forward.

“This technology has the potential to move OPV from laboratory scale and speed printing, to high-speed, exceptionally low cost and ecologically friendly processes,” Jones said here. “This would position the technology as potentially the lowest cost energy per kW available.”

Currently, the projected efficiency of a pilot scale installation of the OPV technology is around 1%–2% with a lifetime of between one and two years. For manufacture at scale, this would correspond to a cost of electricity as low as 88c per kWh.

“When harvesting efficiency is greater than 4%, it will mean that solar sheets can generate the cheapest form of electricity on the planet,” the website says. “Improvement in processes through Mark’s technological expertise should bring about the desired increase in efficiency.”

Dastoor says that while the Tesla road trip will provide a lot of valuable details that UoN is interested in around the solar technology – how it will last over the course of the journey, rolling and unrolling; how it will charge in various parts of Australia – the project is about more than that.

“If we take a step back and we think about what we’re actually doing,” he told Reuters; “we’re taking [an electric] vehicle to the remotest parts of Australia, probably even the remotest parts of the world, and …charging it with a lightweight technology that can generate electricity from sunlight.”