Vikram Solar bags 5-MW solar project in Madurai

JVS Export is a leading manufacturer and exporter of home textiles and the customers of JVS include the likes of Wal-Mart, Lifestyle, Kohl’s and Reliance Industries Limited.

At present the solar power plant by Vikram Solar for JVS Export will be the first power plant for that particular area (Village: Ragunathamadai, District: Virudunagar, Tamil Nadu).  The project will be executed in 100 days, which would be a major achievement. Vikram Solar will be fully responsible for supplying the Vikram make solar photovoltaic modules and other associated equipment including installation and commissioning of the facility followed by O&M.

This project is helping preserve the non renewable resources by generating power naturally and has immensely helped the locals of the area by generating employment for them.

Mr. Gyanesh Chaudhary, Managing Director, Vikram Solar, commented on the occasion, “We are honoured to get an opportunity to install our solar power plant, there. We are thankful to JVS Export for giving us an opportunity to showcase our expertise in the state of Tamil Nadu. I am confident that we will be able to successfully implement this project in the given time schedule”.

Mr M. Britto, Managing Director, JVS Export, said, “we are very happy to have Vikram Solar execute this project for us. We have made the decision to award them this project, after carefully evaluating their production, technical and execution capabilities and their past track record. We found that they matched up to our high standards and we had no hesitation in having them partner us in this project.”

About Vikram Solar

Vikram Solar, a solar module manufacturer in India, is an ISO 9001-2008 accredited Solar EPC company, having its manufacturing facility at the Special Economic Zone (SEZ), Falta, West Bengal. The factory shop floor spreads over a huge production area with an annual production capacity of 150 MW. Vikram Solar has been a top polycrystalline modules manufacturer in India and has a global presence. Its offices are in the United States, Europe and Africa with operations in Spain, Italy, and Australia among the 29 other countries where the Group is present.

Vikram Solar has always believed in quality above anything else and has built a solid foundation in the green energy market. Vikram Solar has become a force to reckon with in Solar PV Module manufacturing and the Solar EPC segment. Their business thrives on honesty, trust and social responsibility. From state of the art solar photovoltaic module, multi crystalline and mono types, Vikram Solar has touched commercial, residential establishments alike. From module ranging from 3wp to 350wp, Vikram Solar looks forward to rapid expansion in the near future with an eye at Grid connected utility scale projects of 100 MW in 2013 in the EPC space and also looks forward to foray into the cell manufacturing by the end of this year with a production capacity of 100 MW.

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Flexible, light solar cells could provide new opportunities

MIT researchers have produced a new kind of photovoltaic cell based on sheets of flexible graphene coated with a layer of nanowires. The approach could lead to low-cost, transparent and flexible solar cells that could be deployed on windows, roofs or other surfaces.

The new approach is detailed in a report published in the journal Nano Letters, co-authored by MIT postdocs Hyesung Park and Sehoon Chang, associate professor of materials science and engineering Silvija Gradecak, and eight other MIT researchers.

While most of today’s solar cells are made of silicon, these remain expensive because the silicon is generally highly purified and then made into crystals that are sliced thin. Many researchers are exploring alternatives, such as nanostructured or hybrid solar cells; indium tin oxide (ITO) is used as a transparent electrode in these new solar cells.

“Currently, ITO is the material of choice for transparent electrodes,” Gradecak says, such as in the touch screens now used on smartphones. But the indium used in that compound is expensive, while graphene is made from ubiquitous carbon.

The new material, Gradecak says, may be an alternative to ITO. In addition to its lower cost, it provides other advantages, including flexibility, low weight, mechanical strength and chemical robustness.

Building semiconducting nanostructures directly on a pristine graphene surface without impairing its electrical and structural properties has been challenging due to graphene’s stable and inert structure, Gradecak explains. So her team used a series of polymer coatings to modify its properties, allowing them to bond a layer of zinc oxide nanowires to it, and then an overlay of a material that responds to light waves — either lead-sulfide quantum dots or a type of polymer called P3HT.

Despite these modifications, Gradecak says, graphene’s innate properties remain intact, providing significant advantages in the resulting hybrid material.

“We’ve demonstrated that devices based on graphene have a comparable efficiency to ITO,” she says — in the case of the quantum-dot overlay, an overall power conversion efficiency of 4.2 percent — less than the efficiency of general purpose silicon cells, but competitive for specialized applications. “We’re the first to demonstrate graphene-nanowire solar cells without sacrificing device performance.”

In addition, unlike the high-temperature growth of other semiconductors, a solution-based process to deposit zinc oxide nanowires on graphene electrodes can be done entirely at temperatures below 175 degrees Celsius, says Chang, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) and a lead author of the paper. Silicon solar cells are typically processed at significantly higher temperatures.

The manufacturing process is highly scalable, adds Park, the other lead author and a postdoc in DMSE and in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The graphene is synthesized through a process called chemical vapor deposition and then coated with the polymer layers. “The size is not a limiting factor, and graphene can be transferred onto various target substrates such as glass or plastic,” Park says.

Gradecak cautions that while the scalability for solar cells hasn’t been demonstrated yet — she and her colleagues have only made proof-of-concept devices a half-inch in size — she doesn’t foresee any obstacles to making larger sizes. “I believe within a couple of years we could see [commercial] devices” based on this technology, she says.

László Forró, a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, who was not associated with this research, says that the idea of using graphene as a transparent electrode was “in the air already,” but had not actually been realized.

“In my opinion this work is a real breakthrough,” Forró says. “Excellent work in every respect.”

He cautions that “the road is still long to get into real applications, there are many problems to be solved,” but adds that “the quality of the research team around this project … guarantees the success.”

The work also involved MIT professors Moungi Bawendi, Mildred Dresselhaus, Vladimir Bulovic and Jing Kong; graduate students Joel Jean and Jayce Cheng; postdoc Paulo Araujo; and affiliate Mingsheng Wang. It was supported by the Eni-MIT Alliance Solar Frontiers Program, and used facilities provided by the MIT Center for Materials Science Engineering, which is supported by the National Science Foundation. 

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