News

30 June 2009

 

QuantaSol raises $2m in funding

As part of an overall £1.975m funding round with Imperial Innovations, alternative energy investor Low Carbon Accelerator (LCA) has made a further investment of £1.175m in solar cell maker QuantaSol Ltd of Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK, which manufactures strain-balanced quantum-well solar cells.

LCA will invest the amount in two tranches: £892,405 immediately, followed by a further £282,595 on the achievement of certain milestones. At the same time, LCA has converted its outstanding £400,000 loan in Quantasol into equity.

Following completion of the round, LCA will have invested a total of £2.375m in Quantasol and raised its stake in the firm from 25.6% to 41.4% of the equity on a fully diluted basis.

QuantaSol was spun off from Imperial College London, UK in June 2007, and is developing third-generation III-V-based solar cells for use by concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) system makers. The firm says that its approach combines several nanostructures, of two or more different alloys, in order to obtain synthetic crystals that overcome the problems associated existing solar cell designs. The structure also greatly enhances the photovoltaic conversion efficiency, it is claimed.

The firm has already delivered a single-junction cell, manufactured on a commercial production line, with a record efficiency of 28.3% at a concentration of greater than 500 suns, as tested independently by Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (FhG-ISE) in Freiburg, Germany. “This is the first time that anyone has successfully combined high efficiency with ease of manufacture, historically a bug-bear of the solar cell industry,” claims CEO Kevin Arthur. Imperial College is featuring a QuantaSol device as part of its presence at this week’s Royal Society Summer Exhibition in London.

QuantaSol says that it will now concentrate on cutting the cost of ownership of solar energy by moving to multi-junction devices. Specifically, the new funding will be used to develop its first commercial triple-junction cell. “We’re now gearing up to provide multi-junction cells of even higher efficiencies as early as Q1/2010,” adds Arthur.

See related items:

LCA increases stake in QuantaSol to 25.6%

Start-up QuantaSol generates £1.35m investment for GaAs-based photovoltaic cells

Search: QuantaSol Low Carbon Accelerator CPV

Visit: www.quantasol.com