4.13.22-Build.nano-Miles-Barr

SPEAKER 1: Really excited to be here to discuss truly transparent solar technology. Ubiquitous Energy is actually a spin-out from MIT. We started up about 10 years ago. I'm a co-founder of the technology and the chief technology officer.

So Ubiquitous, we invite you to think about a world where what if every surface around us could generate its own invisible renewable electricity. We use energy throughout our everyday lives, in our buildings, in our cars, in our devices, in our homes. What if we could generate electricity on-site in the devices we use to power them every day?

This is possible with truly transparent solar technology. This is actually a picture of our glass. It's coated with a transparent solar material. It generates electricity, and it really looks like an ordinary window. It has the same properties of the glass that you put into commercial building or the windows in your home.

Our first products turn skyscrapers or buildings into vertical solar farms, and this is really where we're starting. We see a world where any surface can generate energy, but we have to start somewhere. And so we're starting really in the architectural glass market.

This is a picture of the Bow building in Toronto, and it's actually rendered with our glass. So you can actually build a skyscraper that looks beautiful, looks exactly like the architect would want it to, but it can actually use all of that vertical surface for energy generation, a surface that right now it's passive. So if you look at skyscrapers today there's not a lot of surface where you could put solar technology. Maybe a little bit on the roof, but all that glass surface is really just functional. It's a structural material, and it's used to look out the building and let natural light in.

So how does this work? We call this UE Power for Ubiquitous Energy Power, and it's really based on the idea of redefining how a solar cell actually operates. If you look at conventional solar technology, like a rooftop panel that's made of silicon, it actually captures the spectrum of sunlight throughout the sun spectrum, the ultraviolet light, the infrared light, but also the visible light.

And what we said was, well, what if we could actually make a solar technology that was selective in the parts of the spectrum that it absorbed, and we let the visible light pass through? And that's exactly what we do. We let the visible light pass through the solar material and absorb and convert into electricity, the non-visible light that we can't see with our eye in the ultraviolet and infrared. This is a prototype facade to the left and you can see it's really transparent, because we're letting that visible light pass through.

So this is made possible with nanotechnology. We use exotonic molecular materials to tune the spectral absorption of the semiconductor in the solar cell. And these are essentially molecules that can be inorganic or organic, but the key feature is that they have structured absorption properties. So we can selectively harvest that ultraviolet band and the infrared band while leaving the visible band untouched.

And this is really unique in solar technology. If you look at conventional band-like absorbers, like silicon, it absorbs broadly below the band gap. The materials that we're using, that we're engineering in our facilities, are able to capture, at the band edge, in the infrared, but then the absorption drops back down in the visible, which is what makes them look transparent.

So what we've done over the last five or six years is we've really engineered this technology into a first product, and we've designed it to match standard window glass. So the cross section that you see on the left-hand side here is actually what a typical glass unit looks like. So if you're in a commercial building, like this one, if you look out the window, maybe at the break-- if you look into the cross section, there's actually two pieces of glass there. They're separated with a spacer and filled with a gas like argon. And this dual-pane unit is what's known as an insulated glass unit that provides thermal insulation. So you can maintain the temperature inside the building and reduce thermal losses through the glass.

The other feature of a typical glass unit is there is a coating on the inside surface of that outboard piece of glass. Typically, that coating is passive. It's used really just to reflect the non-visible parts of the spectrum in the infrared. So you don't have solar heating in the building. This is another method that's used today to make the window glass more efficient. And so what we've said is, well, why don't we just replace that coating with this transparent solar coating, which also happens to block that infrared light and the ultraviolet light and convert it into electricity, which we can feed out through wires.

So in the edge of each of these windows is a pigtail that you can plug into your building's energy system. So the features here is that we've designed the coating and the entire window unit to be between 40% and 80% transparent with neutral color. And that range is actually intentional. That's the range of transparencies of commercial building glass today.

Next is we designed the coatings for energy efficiency. And in the glass industry the two figures of merit here are the emmisivity and the solar heat gain coefficient. Emmisivity is, essentially, how much heat you can reflect. And then the solar heat gain coefficient is how much of the spectrum of sunlight actually transmits through the coating and reaches the inside of the building. So a lower solar heat gain coefficient is better for energy efficiency in a warm climate because you reduce the burden on the heating and air conditioning system in the building.

We're able to do this all at low-cost and scale, really, because we're piggybacking on the manufacturing that's standard in the glass industry. We're basically using the exact same product construction and just adding a couple of those molecular materials as a coating on that outboard glass. Those coating materials are all based on earth abundant materials. Typically they're actually organic, and we can synthesize them at kilogram quantity at low-cost.

And then the coating process itself drops right into the low-E coating process that you'd have today. Again that low-E that the commercial glass makers use today. And we just add this additional coating in that same process in line.

And then, finally, reliability is critical here, because a building material needs to last for decades. And so it needs to look like a window, perform like a window for the life of the building. And it also needs to generate electricity for a long enough period of time to get a return on the investment of the solar material.

So the opportunity here is really, really massive. There's $20 billion square feet of window glass installed around the world every year. It's hard to imagine the scale of that. For a typical dimension window, that's enough glass to wrap around the world 100 times. So absolute huge opportunity to convert all of this glass that's already being installed into an energy-generating asset, not just a passive building material.

In commercial buildings we're also able to now unlock energy generation for a number of buildings that have no other surface for conventional solar systems. But this isn't mutually exclusive with conventional rooftop array. You could have a rooftop solar array made of high efficiency silicon panels, then you could have transparent panels on the glass surface of the vertical parts of the building.

So this has the opportunity to offset up to 30% of a building's electricity consumption, really short payback periods, and low cost of energy, primarily because we're piggybacking on an installation that's already happening. The glass is already going into the building, the labor, the structural system. All of that is happening anyways. The only difference here is the wire at the corner of the glass and additional material in the coating that's on the glass.

So I'd like to show just a couple example installations that we've done to give you a sense of what you can do with this technology. All of these are based on glass that's coming off of our pilot production line in Silicon Valley. And so the first thing you'll notice is that these are small windows, and this is really meant for development.

I'll talk a little bit more about the scale up in a minute. But all of these use these small windows which are able to generate energy, but that's why you have this grid pattern. But you get the same benefit if you scale this up to larger sizes.

So this was our first installation at our headquarters. We put in about 100 square feet of this glass, and really, to demonstrate that this looks like ordinary glass. The reflected color on the outside of the building, so the way the building looks from the outside, looks like a conventional commercial building. And then the view through the glass is completely transparent. If you sit inside this room there's really no way to tell that this glass is any different than the glass you might have in this room anyways.

And so what we've done here is we've connected this whole facade up to an energy storage system and a monitoring system. And then the stored energy we've actually have connected to the lighting in the adjacent conference room. And this is just one use of the energy that is very tangible. It's like the energy that's produced off this glass can power the lighting in the conference room and in the atrium of the building.

Next is an installation we did at Michigan State University. Here we put a transom of another 100 square feet of glass above the entryway to one of their engineering buildings. And here we're powering, again, the lighting in the atrium of this building. The thing I really like about this installation is that we were able to blend into the existing glass of the building. So we engineered the color and the aesthetics of our glass to match the building that was going into to really show that this can just fit into to the existing environment that the architects had intended.

We have a couple partners around the world. One is Nippon Sheet Glass, NSG, which is one of the largest flat glass producers in the world. And we've done a couple of different installations with them that are more of test sites.

The one on the left is in Tokyo, and here we built two small buildings. Essentially, the one on the left has normal glass, and the one on the right has the transparent solar glass. And these buildings are controlled environment where we can monitor the heat load inside of that small room. So the air conditioning will kick on when it hits a certain temperature. And so in addition to monitoring the energy generation we can monitor the thermal performance of the glass itself to make sure that it is actually comparable to the conventional windows, which it is. And then the right is at their R&D center in Toledo, Ohio where we're also monitoring the energy generation in a different climate zone.

And finally, here is a site we did in Boulder, Colorado where this is a near net zero building where there is conventional solar technology on the opaque facade of the building. There's also a solar array on the roof. And so what we wanted to demonstrate here is that you can actually couple different energy-generating technologies together. You can have conventional solar where that makes sense. You can have transparent solar in the glass surface. And these can all be integrated into a single energy system in the building for the maximum possible benefit to support net zero, to get you over the hump to net zero in a building like this.

And then, lastly, I mentioned that all these panels are somewhat small. So the next step for us is scale up. I mentioned that we use conventional coating technology that's used by the glass industry. We've been working with a number of different manufacturing equipment partners around the world to scale up our process equipment. This is actually the first piece of glass that we've coated on some of this equipment. That's about 5 foot by 10 foot in size, and that's the size of our first manufacturing line that we're working on scaling up over the next few years.

And this is actually coated with these materials. So these have those molecular nanomaterials coated on them. The uniformity here across this panel is about 1%, plus or minus 1%. And this is for a coating that's only tens of nanometers thick.

And so to give you a sense of that difference in nonuniformity is plus or minus 1 one molecule. And that's why this all looks completely optically uniform, and it's taking some engineering to get there, but this is kind of paving the way for our first high volume manufacturing line, which will be serving the architectural glass market in both commercial buildings and also residential buildings. And so with that I'll close, and we can see if there's any questions. But thanks for the time, and you can-- we have a table in the lunch room, so if you'd like to chat you can meet me out there.

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SPEAKER 2: So we do have several questions. First one is, is your solar glass product commercially available today for a new high-rise or urban infill construction Project?

SPEAKER 1: Not available today. It will be available in a couple of years. Right now we're really just doing those demonstration projects, and then the production line will come up in a couple of years.

SPEAKER 2: And how does the efficiency measure against traditional solar PV panels?

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, that's a great question. So the fundamental way that the technology function is to transmit the visible part of the spectrum. That visible part of the spectrum accounts for about 1/3 of the energy potential, or the photon potential, in sunlight. So at full maturity you'd expect for a fully transparent panel to be about 1/3 less efficient than a completely opaque panel.

SPEAKER 2: Is there any potential for retrofitting existing double-pane windows with a stack or potential to replace whole IGUs completely in a deep energy retrofit?

SPEAKER 1: Certainly replacing full IGUs is no problem. Adding this onto an existing glass surface is a little more challenging. It's not impossible. There's two approaches that we could take. We could either have a film that gets applied as a laminate onto an existing glass surface. That's down the road for us. That's not our first product. The other is more of like a storm window approach, where you have an external glass sheet that gets applied after the fact to an existing glass window.

SPEAKER 2: I think you addressed two. Let me see. What is the cost premium compared to traditional windows? If you can--

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, to be determined. It's small, and I think that the key here is that we're piggybacking on everything that's being done. So there is a slight cost adder at the glass unit itself, because we are adding a material. We're adding wires onto the glass part.

But for the whole solar system all of the installation, the labor, the structural system to hold the glass, that's all a sunk cost. So the cost of the glass unit's a little bit more, 10%, 20%, 30% more, but at the fully installed level it's much lower.

SPEAKER 2: With a payback, as you mentioned, in about three years--

SPEAKER 1: With short payback periods of a few years, yeah.

SPEAKER 2: Thank you very much, and just a reminder that Miles will be in the room at lunch. So if you have further questions, please feel free to track him down there.

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