First Solar, Inc. (Tempe, Arizona) has issued its 2022 Sustainability Report highlighting its continued, industry-leading environmental, social, and governance (ESG) progress. The only US-headquartered company among the world’s ten largest solar manufacturers, First Solar’s photovoltaic (PV) solar modules are reported to have the lowest carbon and water footprint and fastest energy payback time of any commercially available PV technology today.
For the first time, an efficiency of 30% for perovskite-on-silicon-tandem solar cells has been exceeded thanks to a joint effort led by scientists at EPFL’s Photovoltaics and Thin Film Electronics Laboratory in partnership with the renowned innovation centre, CSEM (Neuchâtel, Switzerland). Independently certified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the United States, these results are a boost to high-efficiency photovoltaics (PV) and pave the way toward even more competitive solar electricity generation.
The partners of the EU project FlexFunction2Sustain have committed themselves to create a network for innovative solutions for sustainable and smart products powered by nano-functionalised paper and plastic in order to support SMEs, start-ups and industries in the development and market launch of pioneering products. After the first two years, a number of promising results and prototypes have emerged and have been presented at the Conference for Industrial Technologies IndTech 2022 in Grenoble, France, 27-29 June 2022. Among them, a recently finalised highlight: the first working organic photovoltaic cell on recycled plastics.
