Nordic Centre of Excellence in Photovoltaics (PV)

Background
The overall challenge for the solar cell industry is to bring down the cost/kWh in order to become competitive with other energy resources in the future. Currently the annual increase of the shipment of solar cells is higher than 30 % and has been between 25 and 40 % during the last decade. This large increase has mainly been stimulated by national programmes with favourable feed-in tariffs and/or subsidies of investment costs. However, in the near future there will probably be a shift from program-stimulated expansion to market driven expansion. In Japan, which has for long been the largest market for solar cells, this will be finalized next year. Subsidies will no longer be available for solar electricity installations, making cost a critical issue.

The Nordic region has in recent years experienced the introduction and fast expansion of a solar electricity industry. In order to secure the continued expansion of this industry, a strong Nordic R&D platform is required.

Project goal
The main objective of the project is to strengthen the already formed Nordic R&D network and develop it into a centre of excellence effectively serving the fast-growing and demanding Nordic PV industry. This will be achieved by:

• Defining a PhD program with compulsory mobility of the students
• Arranging general workshops within solar cell research
• Organizing in-depth workshops on selected topics
• Giving hands-on workshops on processing of solar cells
• Actively disseminate results both in public and scientific media channels

The project is of high relevance for the Nordic energy sector both with respect to industrial development and installation of PV-systems.



Project Steering Group:
• Arve Holt, Project Manager, Institute for Energy Technology, NO
• Peter Lund, Helsinki University of Technology, FI
• Hanne Lauritzen, Danish Technological Institute, DK
• Turid Worren, NTNU, NO
• Viatcheslav Andreev, Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, RUS
• Enn mellikov, Tallinn University of Technology, EST
• Marika Edoff, University of Uppsala, SE

More information
Project Duration: 2007 - 2010
The total project budget is 12.766.000 million NOK
Nordic Energy Research contributes 8 million NOK (63 %)

Contact information
Project Manager: Arve Holt, Deputy Head of Department, Institute for Energy Technology, Norway
Phone: +47 63 80 61 95
Email: arve.holt@ife.no

Any preliminary results and publications from this project will be presented on this website, as well as in our quarterly newsletter.