Nanoco wins £400k grant for solar cell link up

HIGH-tech company Nanoco has received a grant of almost £400,000 from Innovate UK to help it development of printable solar cell technology.

The firm was awarded the cash from Innovate, the Government agency formerly known as the Technology Strategy Board, under the Energy Catalyst programme as part of a collaborative project with Loughborough University’s Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST), which will also receive an Innovate grant for the project.

The objective of the two-year £1m project is to build on Nanoco’s progress in solar energy by using its copper, indium gallium, selenide (CIGS) solar ink to create a solution-processed, integrated film photovoltaic mini-module.

Nanoco and CREST will work together to optimise the mini-module architecture.

Nanoco chief executive Michael Edelman said: “We are very pleased to receive this grant (£399,562) to fund the next stage of development in our exciting solar ink technology.

“We have already achieved an efficiency of around 17% from the solar ink and it is the objective of this grant funded project to scale the technology up to the size of a mini-module.”

The company, which has a manufacturing facility in Runcorn, recently announced its intention to raise £20m in a move from the AIM to the London Stock Exchange and follows an optimistic assessment of its prospects when it published its half-yearly results.

Uppermost in the Nanoco success story was its move towards commercialisation of its cadmium-free quantum dot technology.