US-based cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar PV manufacturer First Solar has entered a multi-year, exclusive supply agreement with quantum dot (QD) nanotechnology company UbiQD. This agreement will allow First Solar to source the latter’s proprietary fluorescent QD technology for its thin-film bifacial solar modules.
UbiQD says this agreement will enable the early adoption of QD into thin-film modules and could boost the company’s annual production capacity to over 100 metric tons (MT).
This follows the results of their joint development agreement announced in August 2023, when the duo unveiled plans to engineer quantum dot technology for use in utility-scale solar to improve efficiency (see Joint Development Effort For Quantum Dot Tech). The companies have also expanded their R&D collaboration.
Without specifying the details of the agreement, UbiQD Founder and CEO, Hunter McDaniel, said, “This is a turning point for the quantum dot industry with this first high volume QD supply agreement outside of display.”
Nano semiconductor particles, or QD, that are a few nanometers wide, absorb sunlight and emit intensely bright, tunable light. These are highly effective at manipulating color and light, explains UbiQD, which is useful in solar energy applications. It claims that incorporating QDs into solar panel encapsulation can more than double the bifacial quantum efficiency of light conversion for specific wavelengths/colors. It can increase energy output with minimal changes to manufacturing processes, adds the company.
While the company has not disclosed specific details about the technology, the integration of QDs into the encapsulation layer holds promising potential. QDs can function as miniature light converters, absorbing photons and re-emitting them at wavelengths that align with the peak quantum efficiency of the PV material. Their spectral tunability further enables optimization of both the absorbed and emitted light spectra to match the absorption characteristics of the solar cell.
This approach is, perhaps, very suitable for enhancing bifacial performance. Even with bifaciality exceeding 90%, traditional bifacial modules typically achieve only a 10-25% gain in energy yield. By converting diffuse and reflected light into more absorbable wavelengths, QDs can significantly increase rear-side power generation, unlocking greater energy yields and improved overall module performance.
“At utility-scale, even incremental gains in bifaciality translate into significant real-world impact on energy yield,” said First Solar Chief Technology Officer, Markus Gloeckler. “We're excited about the potential for quantum dot technology to contribute meaningful gains to the performance of our bifacial modules.”
UbiQD has licensed its intellectual property from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including key patents co-authored by Nobel Laureate Moungi Bawendi.
It recently raised $20 million in a Series B funding round as it targets building one of the highest-volume QD manufacturing facilities globally by 2026, in New Mexico.
Keeping its focus on solar energy, earlier this year, UbiQD acquired BlueDot Photonics, a spin-off of the University of Washington, including its perovskite-based quantum cutting technology. It claims the use of this technology could increase silicon solar panel efficiency by up to 16%, thus also lowering the cost of power generation.
