Solar glazing firm enjoys moment in the sun

A British start-up working on "solar glazing" technology has walked away with a £100,000 grant from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) after winning a Dragons’ Den style audition yesterday.

Kevin Arthur, founder and chief executive of Oxford Photovoltaics, convinced a four-man panel of experts that his company's technology, organic compound-imprinted glass capable of generating solar energy, was the most commercially viable proposition among the start-ups on display.

Oxford PV was one of four winning companies out of the 12 finalists in the TSB’s Competition for Disruptive Solutions. The 12 companies were chosen from 548 video entries in four areas – energy, sustainability, digital and healthcare. Each was awarded £25,000 and given the chance to pitch for the full £100,000 prize.
Arthur said that the money would be used to take on another technical expert to further develop the product, which he predicted could become "a dominant solution in the Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) market".
He admitted that the company's first challenge is to improve the efficiency at which the glazing converts light into energy, pushing it up from the current five per cent conversion rate into double digits.

However, he insisted that while it currently required one square metre of solar glazing to produce 100W, the technology was available at a significantly lower cost than traditional solar PV panels. He predicted that the technology could be rolled out at a cost of around $8 per square metre, making it a renewable energy option for new build and retrofit projects.

"Once we can get these generation three technologies going we can dominate the market," he said of the higher efficiency technology the company is working on.

Two other clean tech firms made the energy final: RE Hydrogen unveiled an alkaline electrolyser stack producing 2.3kg of hydrogen for synthetic diesel and fuel cells, while Arcola Energy demonstrated LED lighting powered by a range of inputs, from solar PV to hydrogen fuel cells.

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