Norwegian industrial companies are among the world leaders in the market for solar-cell materials, which is dominated by components made from super-pure silicon. The extremely high rate of growth of this market has led to a shortage of this material. Norwegian industry has chosen to study a wide range of different processes to produce this material, and has engaged SINTEF/NTNU to be its partner in research.

In order to mitigate the world-wide lack of solar cell-quality silicon, SINTEF has also developed a new process based on plasma technology – SolSilc. The intention is that this process will enable us to produce large amounts of silicon for solar cells at much lower cost than current standard methods can achieve.

The Norwegian Research Centre for Solar Cell Technology
Ten years of continuous efforts in the field of solar cells have given SINTEF/NTNU a leading position in certain aspects of research on solar cell materials. We also cooperate closely with IFE, and the importance of such research in Norway will be increased even more when we have established a Research Centre for Environmentally Friendly Energy on solar-cell materials.

Most solar cells are now being manufactured using multicrystalline silicon. Such cells have an efficiency of around 15% (i.e. about 15% of the energy in the sunlight that reaches them is converted to electrical energy).

However, activity on other solar cell technologies is also rising . By using monocrystalline silicon we can increase efficiency to about 20%. A number of other technologies, based on thin-films and nanostructures are also being studied with a view to developing solutions that will result in lower energy prices in the future.

More than 50 people at SINTEF are involved in research on solar-cell materials.