Solar paint, PV windows and more efficient tandem cells will drive a huge solar boom in Australia throughout the next two decades, according to a leading UNSW expert.
“The last 20 years in solar have been really exciting, and I think the next 20 years are going to surprise everybody,” Renate Egan, professor and executive director at the UNSW’s Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics said, according to the university’s website.
Egan is confident electricity generation in Australia will be 100 per cent supplied via renewables by 2050, with solar providing over half of the total.
“We just had the 2023 numbers come in for Australia, and we’re close to 20 per cent of our electricity being met by solar,” she said.
“By 2030, the targets are to be at over 80 per cent renewables and we would expect 40 per cent to come from solar.”
While today’s solar technology should be deployed rapidly, Egan believes new photovoltaic innovations will emerge to help achieve 100 per cent renewables.
According to her, energy may come from thin, flexible printed films attached to surfaces, as well as solar glass windows already produced overseas that can turn entire buildings into power generators, albeit less efficiently than traditional panels.
“The concept of solar paint, I think, translates to these thin film flexible panels,” Egan said.
“We are actually producing now, in Australia, at the CSIRO in Melbourne and a group in the University of Newcastle, a thin film roll-to-roll printing process,” she said.
“It’s a bit like the way bank notes are printed. On a flexible polymer backing, you can print materials that you can turn into solar cells. And you can imagine hanging solar canopies, flexible solar arrays on various surfaces.
Traditional silicon panels will also become more efficient, by stacking new materials on top in a “tandem structure” to capture energy the silicon misses, according to Egan.
“The industry keeps surprising me because it’s growing at a phenomenal rate,” she said.
“We are going to see so much change in the next 20 years.”
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