News 2021

Early Bird registration is still open until March 8, 2021 for the 17th edition of the leading international conference on concentrator PV systems CPV-x. Due to the Corona pandemic, the conference will be held virtually only.

With the Green Deal, Europe embarks on the journey to become the first climate-neutral continent. More than ever, photovoltaics (PV) offer great opportunities to accomplish this goal but their full potential of today remains untapped. The time has come for a Photovoltaics Renaissance: Europe is world leading in PV R&D, the cost of solar electricity has decreased significantly, and the number of installations is expected to increase sharply in the coming years. The market conditions offer great opportunities. However, there is a gap in Europe’s PV market: There is hardly any production of PV cells in the EU anymore. The 3rd webinar of the Fraunhofer Green Deal Series, »The Photovoltaics Renaissance- New opportunities for a key enabler of the clean energy transition«, held online on Tuesday, 9 March 2021 - 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. looks into the latest scientific insights into potentials for PV in the EU.

Photon upconversion, the conversion of low-energy into higher-energy photons, has gained much interest in the fields of materials chemistry and physics. However, an adequate theoretical framework to optimize photonic structure designs for upconversion enhancement has been lacking. Researchers from Fraunhofer ISE have developed a comprehensive simulation tool to model photonic effects on upconversion dynamics. In an international cooperation with R&D groups from Stanford University, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Aarhus University, they now reached an experimental validation of the modeling framework and published their work in Nature Communications.