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Antora Energys new 2 MW factory will manufacture thermo-photovoltaic cells for thermal storage applications based on III-V semiconductors and with a heat-to-electricity conversion efficiency of more than 40%.
Antora Energy has started production at its 2 MW thermophotovoltaic cell factory in Sunnyvale (California).
“The cells are based on III-V semiconductors, which outperform conventional solar cells and produce 100 times more power than devices of similar size,” CEO Andrew Ponec told pv magazine. “Cells can convert any high-temperature heat source into electricity and their most important application is energy storage,” he added, referring to Thermal Grid Energy Storage (TEGS), which is a scale-up energy storage technology. network and low cost that uses TPV to convert heat into electricity above 2,000 ºC.
Thermophotovoltaics (TPV) is a power generation technology that uses thermal radiation to generate electricity in photovoltaic cells. A POS system generally consists of a thermal emitter that can reach high temperatures, close to or higher than 1,000 ºC, and a diode photovoltaic cell that can absorb photons from the heat source.
The technology has aroused the interest of scientists for decades, because it is capable of capturing sunlight across the entire solar spectrum and has the technical potential to surpass the Shockley-Queisser limit of traditional photovoltaics. However, the efficiencies reported so far have been too low to make it commercially viable, as POS devices continue to suffer from optical and thermal losses.
“Until now, TPV technology has not reached either the efficiency threshold necessary to compete with traditional heat engines or the manufacturability threshold necessary to produce the technology at scale,” says Antora Energy. “Antora has now reached both critical thresholds, demonstrating heat-to-power efficiencies in excess of 40%, and demonstrating the ability to manufacture POS at scale.”
The startup said it has secured funding from the California Energy Commission to build the POS manufacturing line in California in 2021.
“Some of the earliest funding for Antora was provided by the US Department of Energys Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy to develop the TPV technology in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Arizona State University,” the company said.
In April, a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the US Department of Energys National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) presented a thermophotovoltaic cell (TPV) with III-V materials with bandgaps between 1.0 and 1.4 eV. This cell achieved an efficiency of 41.1% operating at a power density of 2.39 W cm-2 and an emitter temperature of 2,400 C. The group presented the device in “Thermophotovoltaic efficiency of 40%”, recently published in Nature. |
