11.8.22-Tokyo-Showcase-Swift-Solar

JOEL JEAN: Thanks, Jill. Hello? All right. Thanks, Steve. Yeah, so again, I'm Joel Jean. I'm co-founder and CEO of Swift Solar. So we are making more powerful solar cells. And actually I'm especially excited to be here in Japan talking about solar, because as some of you may know, Japan has played a critical role in the history of the solar industry.

So Japan actually was the first country to invest massively in deploying solar energy and was the world leader in solar deployment every year in the '90s through 2003. So in a way, Japan laid the foundation for the entire solar industry. And you could say, I guess, I'm only here today because Japan, 30 years ago, back when I was a kid, was investing before anyone else believed in solar technology at scale.

I'm also here because of MIT. I grew up as a scientist at MIT, did my PhD in electrical engineering. Three of our co-founders are actually researchers, were researchers at MIT. We have an advisor who is a professor at MIT and we actually spun out our technology from MIT, Stanford, and the US National Renewable Energy Lab, NREL. So we have exclusive IP from these three institutions and we are building solar cells.

So fundamentally the world is relying on solar energy to fight climate change. So energy models, the leading energy models today, expect 30 to 50 plus percent of energy by 2050 to come from solar power. But today's solar technology, silicon, is over 60 years old, right? So it is actually running into its fundamental limits.

80% of the market today is dominated by China. And fundamentally, from a physical, thermodynamic standpoint, it is running into a limit. So we believe that it's time for something new, something better. And that something better could be perovskites. So a perovskite is just a generic crystal structure, this ABX3 crystal structure. You can see it up here in the top layer as a cartoon.

But we make a synthetic perovskite using man-made materials, so a combination of organic and inorganic materials. And when you combine these they turn into a very, very high-performance semiconductor. So the exciting thing here is you can actually tune the perovskite to absorb different colors of light.

So what we can do is tune a perovskite so this top layer absorbs more blue or high-energy light. And then we tune another perovskite or use a silicon cell as the bottom cell, which absorbs red or near-infrared light, lower energy light. So when you have two cells together absorbing different parts of the solar spectrum, you can optimize each one separately. So that gets you to a higher efficiency.

So in the history of the solar industry, or in the history of solar technology, we've actually never seen a technology that was able to check both of these boxes. So to make low-cost solar power you need efficiency and you need low cost. So there have been many good technologies that have come and gone. Silicon, the world leader, 95% of the market today, is already very efficient and it's very cheap.

But all of these other technologies that came around to try to displace silicon have had troubles because they weren't able to check both of these boxes. In perovskite tandems for the first time we have a technology that can actually do both. So here's the data.

So this blue line up here, this is the silicon efficiency limit. You've seen over the last 60 years, we've seen the technology advance from 6% back in 1954, at Bell Labs, to today, where we're approaching 30%. The best silicon cells are about 26-27% efficient.

So it's running into this theoretical limit, the fundamental limit for any single-junction solar cell, any single-material solar cell. And this is the data for Swift Solar. So we've been able to push this technology. My co-founders did some of the earliest work in this field, set the first perovskite tandem world record, perovskite silicon tandem, perovskite on perovskite tandems, did a lot of the foundational work. And we've over the last 10 years been pushing this technology forward at Stanford, at MIT, and at NREL, and really now have exceeded the state of the art in silicon performance.

And there's a lot more headroom to go. So how can you use this technology? Well, one of the key drawbacks right now is that the technology has not been around very long. There's no guarantee that it will last 25 plus years in the field. So that's a big challenge. But things like watches, consumer products, IoT devices, don't need to last for 25 years.

So here's a watch, solar-powered. Integrate solar into the rim of the watch and you can double the battery life. Other use cases, low-earth orbit satellites, where you need something that's radiation-hard, very lightweight, highly efficient. You don't need it to cost $0.20 a watt.

And perovskites can do many of those things. They're actually very, very radiation-hard, more radiation-hard than today's leading space solar. Things like light duty EVs-- I'm very excited about this-- in a place like California that has a lot of sunlight, you can actually drive for many, many more miles using sunlight.

So you can-- a typical US driver, because they don't commute very far, can actually go for up to six months without plugging in to charge, if you have enough solar, efficient enough solar, and efficient enough EVs. So here's a prototype module we made for the California Energy Commission. They're very excited about integrating solar to reduce grid-charging loads during peak hours. So you can charge midday when you're parked outdoors in California.

This is a 50 by 30 centimeter panel. And you can see it just looks like a black panel. It's curved to integrate into a car and it just integrates seamlessly. Of course, anywhere you could have put solar before, you can still put solar. You can put perovskite tandems, rooftops, building integration.

If you want to get more solar power out of the same area, if you want to get cheaper solar power, better and cheaper is what we're aiming for. So anywhere where you could put solar before, we'll do it better and do it cheaper. That includes utility-scale solar as well.

So Swift Solar is still an early-stage company. We're going into, we're raising our Series A right now. We are actually at 30-people based in California and Colorado at the National Renewable Energy Lab. And we do have strategic partners in joint development and customers and suppliers in Japan as well as Korea.

We're very excited to be here talking to you all about all of these different segments, consumer electronics, wearables, IoT, space, aerospace, electric vehicles, and, of course, traditional solar. So anyone who's interested in any of those areas, wants to integrate the next generation of solar cells, please come talk to me, talk to my colleagues, our head of business development Diana Nielsen is in the back over there and will be around for the showcase.

So thank you very much. We appreciate you hosting us.

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