Silicon solar cell

Swansea University’s School of Engineering has teamed up with local wafer reclaim group Pure Wafer to develop a low-cost solar cell fabricated from recovered silicon.

The silicon used is a waste product from Pure Wafer’s main semiconductor wafer reclaim business. Researchers at the university hope that its use will lead to significantly cheaper photovoltaic (PV) modules for the development of solar panels and renewable-energy plants.

Simon Conway, Pure Wafer’s technologies leader, said: ‘The project consortium, which also involves three other Welsh businesses, aims to manufacture low-cost, high-efficiency PV modules in Wales by 2010.

‘We are also developing novel thin-wafer technology, which reduces the amount of silicon used in the solar cells, cutting costs even further,’ he added.

Pure Wafer, which announced on 17 March that is has suspended trading on AIM, usually ships the silicon overseas to be reprocessed into lower-quality crystalline PV cells – a material that dominates 90 per cent of the solar market. The cells developed by Pure Wafer and Swansea University have been incorporated into modules made up of around 90 connecting cells that can generate a larger amount of electricity.