 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community Matters here. Hi everybody, the day before Thanksgiving Day, and my name is Mitch Ewan. I'm the host of Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy. In my day job, I'm the hydrogen systems guy at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. So one of the things I'm trying to do in this series is to show off really interesting research development demonstration that we're doing at HNEI, the University of Hawaii. Try and show the general public who actually ultimately helped pay for all of this that they're getting some good value for the money. We're doing good things for Hawaii that will help us achieve our clean energy goals and so I kind of feature our researchers that are doing some really neat stuff. And today I'm really pleased to have Nicholas Diard from France, commonly known as Niko around HNEI. And Niko's been with us for quite a long time and he's doing work in photovoltaics, PV. I mean a lot of you people out in the audience probably have PV arrays on your roof and supplementing or offsetting or maybe even covering all of your energy requirements. So I've invited Niko and he kindly agreed to appear to talk about some of his interesting projects. And first of all I want to ask him a few questions about his background. So first of all Niko, welcome on board. Thanks for having me, Mish. Thanks for coming. Of course. It's really a challenge sometimes to find people that are willing to come on this show because they're so busy you know and it's like takes time. So first of all give us a little bit of information about your background, where you're from and what's your expertise and what did you do before you came to Hawaii? So I'm originally from France. I grew up in a city called Grenoble, Grenoble. It's at the bottom of the Alps in France. So it's the city that hosted the UNP Games in 68. The home of Jean-Claude Killet. That's exactly right. So it's a beautiful place surrounded by mountains and it's a great place to grow up. And so I did all my studies in this city. My first sets of studies were to become a technician. Actually it was a very short cycle only two years and then I had the chance to enter the National Graduate School of Physics. Oh really? And for three years and I studied microelectronics and nanotechnologies to become an engineer in physics. So nanotechnologies that longer ago was it? I mean was that still coming up? Oh yeah, it's still really relevant to what we do, whether it's catalysis or whether it's solar cells, nanotechnologies, it's present everywhere these days. And then I moved to Japan to do my master working for Nippon telegraph and telecom. So I was doing again nanotechnologies and nanodevices. I came back to France to do my PhD in a private firm that actually makes microchips for computers and phones. So dealing with fabs, these gigantic fabs where you process wafers and make transistors. And then I decided that I wanted to move away from France for a short while. We turned out to be 11 years now. First as a postdoctoral fellow and then eventually... So what does a postdoctoral fellow mean for those of us who are not at the time in academics? So a postdoctoral fellow is someone who just finishes PhD and wants to gain experience in different labs. So usually when you do a postdoctoral fellowship, you do multiple fellowships to gain experience and maybe return in your home country to become a professor. And I just decided to do one and decided that Hawaii was my base. So why did you decide at Hawaii? What was the attraction? Apart from the great waves? Because I love surfing. That's pretty much the reason why I'm here. Yeah, that's what brought me here in the first place. And as it turns out, University of Hawaii and HNI was dealing with the same type of technologies as what I was doing for the microelectronic industry. That's pretty much the same processes. And so I just called and asked for a job. So I think our boss, like Rick Roshlow, is now the director of HNI. Did he set up the original lab? So he set up the original lab. But when I joined HNI Eric Muir was actually leading the group and then he left for DC and I took over the lab ten years ago now. Just for the audience, I mean, didn't we have like pretty well world, some world class technology that we developed here? We did. We did. We have patents. So back in the late 90s, 1998 HNI filed for a patent for a device that can produce solar fuels out of sunlight and water. So hang on yeah. What's a solar fuel? So a solar fuel is essentially a fuel that's been created by a material that can absorb light and drive a chemical reaction. So essentially what you do with the solar fuel is that you store light energy by breaking and making chemical bonds. Okay. And you store these solar fuels, one of them could be hydrogen for example. Once you make hydrogen you can store the hydrogen, transport it, and eventually re-use it into a fuel cell to get the electricity back. So it's a mean of storing energy. Okay. So it's that fuel or substance that's been created out of a solar renewable energy source or solar source. That is correct. Hey, great stuff. So I understand you've brought some slides along. I do. You can even see some samples of some of the work that you have here, right on the table. And so people aren't here to hear me talk but to listen to you and I understand your slides so I think they're very good for a layman type audience. So why don't we mount up some of Nico's slides and we can just talk to them and tell us what we're seeing. Sure. So in my group at HNEI we work on a lot of different type of structures that we call either thin films or nanostructures. We have multiple projects but just for today I've decided to focus on two very different technologies that are quite important for renewable energy production and storage. The first one is what we call printable photovoltaics and it's a method that we developed to lower the manufacturing costs and find a high throughput method to make photovoltaics. I'm going to talk about that. And the other method, so this program is supported by the Office of Naval Research. And the second topic is the solar fuels. So how can you make a solar material absorbing light and breaking and forming chemical bonds to again store solar energies into chemical bonds. So that will be the two topics that we're going to cover. So let's have the next slide. Sure. So just to give you an idea of the global energy sector and the demand versus the resources. If you look at the world consume about 20 terawatt of power every year. So 20 terawatt is 20 with 12 zeros right after. So it's a huge amount of energy. And if you look at the countries that actually consume the most, the first one will be China with 5.3 terawatt and right in second place we have the U.S. with 4 terawatts. So it's quite a large number of power. And China has a population measuring in the billions. Yeah, so if you rate that to the number of habitants, it's quite a lot for the U.S. It's a lot. And so that just combine everything, oil, electricity, it's a global number. So now if you just look at the renewable resources that we have worldwide, you'll find that every year you get about 4 terawatts of wind blowing at the surface of the earth. So if you were to convert that wind with wind turbine you would get about 4 terawatts. From biomass you would get about 5 terawatts from geothermal one and from solar 120,000 terawatts. Wow. So that's a huge resource. That's a huge resource. And the game is how can you harvest that energy produce it, use it and store it. That's really what we're trying to do here. So these numbers are pretty big but to give you some sort of a better idea, you could think for example that every hour the sun outputs on earth enough energy to power the world for a year. Wow. So by the end of this show there's going to be probably enough solar power that reaches the earth that could be used to power the world for a year. Wow. It's huge. Yeah. And if you just want to compare that to the U.S. and that 4 terawatts of what we need, that we need, the area required to capture 4 terawatts of electricity per year is a square of 150 miles by 150 miles. Is that all? Yeah. So it's about 0.5% of the U.S. territory. Wow. So if you can show the slide number two again, you'll see that that represent about half of the desert in Nevada. At the bottom. Yeah. So it's not a whole lot. Oh, I see. Yeah. It's not a whole lot. That's amazing. So obviously this is centralized. In reality you need to dispatch this electricity so you would have homeowners having PD or you could have centralized power plants. But just to give you a sense of scale, that's just how much you need to power the U.S. And that would be transportation, everything we use. Wow. Yeah. Everything we use. And it's clean energy. And it's clean energy. Very good. So let's look at the next slide. Yeah. So the next slides show you the different technologies that are available these days. So if you look at the PV market share, about 90% of the market is led by crystalline silicon, which is the standard PV material that we are all familiar with. If you look at let's call that 100% of the PV modules installed in Hawaii by homeowners, these would be the crystalline silicon. So I got some symbols here which show you a silicon cell. So that's a device that's about let's call that 3 inch by 3 inch. And so that's one unique cell. And in a module, usually you have all these cell cells in series with interconnection between them to capture the electricity produced by every single one of these cells. So it's fairly fragile on its own I guess. It is very fragile. Yeah, I show you another one and that's going to bring me to the next topic. But yeah, the main drawback with the silicon technology is that it's a great electronic materials, but it's not such a great solar absorber. And to be able to capture pretty much all the photons in the solar spectrum, you need a fairly thick silicon wafer, about a millimeter thick. So these are very rigid, quite heavy. They need to be framed with a very sturdy frame with a piece of glass sitting on top. And so for local production and stationary production, this is just fine. But as you can see, you cannot bend these things, otherwise they would just break and shatter your fingers. So that's the reason why there is another type of technology and that's a technology I'm working on with my group in the lab, which is called Thin Films, if you want to go back to the slide. And so the Thin Films, the market share is about 10%. So you do have company who tries to make Thin Films for large scale PV plants. First solar is one in the US. They make what we call Canyon Terroride Thin Film Modules. But really the main advantage of the Thin Films is that because they are such great solar absorbers, you don't need a millimeter thick solar absorber to capture light. Only a micron, which is about a hundredth the size of human hair. Okay, so I'm looking at this picture in the bottom left-hand corner. You see some soldiers, I guess they're erecting a tent that's covered with this Thin Film. Exactly. And they're actually standing on the Thin Film stuff and you can see it's all wrinkled and fully flexible. So it's very flexible. It's actually as flexible as a substrate. Really? So what you have here is a Thin Film solar cell on a metal foil and all the rigidity of the solar cell comes from the foil itself. I see. The foil is required as a substrate, but you don't need the foil to make the solar cell work. So you could imagine that you could deposit that on cloth, if you can, on plastics if the temperature allows it. And you can make all sorts of different solar devices. So you see, for example, here, as you mentioned, solar cells on cloth. All what I call the wearable PV. So when you see solar panels on backpacks, usually these are Thin Films as well. They're simply stitched onto the backpack. And all the way on the right-hand side of these slides, you have what we call Building Integrative PV. So you could have these flexible solar cells either glued on top of the roof so you pretty much peel the backing plate and stick it onto the building. Or you can make semi-transparent solar cells. What you can see here is that the light is actually going through the solar cell and the shadow that you see is the light that's being transmitted. So you see some red, some blue. Yeah, I was going to ask, why do we have all the multi-different colors there? Is that just the breakdown of the spectrum? That is exactly right. So we're going to talk about that in a few slides. When you want to make a highly efficient solar cell, you don't want just a single solar absorber that will capture light only in the fraction of the solar spectrum. You want to stack the solar cell. You want to make what I call an optical funnel with a solar cell that can capture blue photons, a solar cell that can capture red photons, and a solar cell that can capture infrared photons. And that's a better way to capture light and to boost the efficiency of the solar cells. So tuning the color of the solar absorber is really what we do on a daily basis in being able to control the color and their conversion efficiency. So you'll see some picture. So like on the next slide? Yeah, so what's next is, yeah, so how do we make these solar cells? So the standard crystalline silicon cells actually come from an ingot of silicon. Which is like sand. So you start with sand, you melt the silicon, you melt the quartz of the sand and there's some chemical reactions with, I believe, graphite to extract the oxygen from the silicon oxide, which is then to end up with the pure silicon element. And then what you do out of that is on top of that molten pool of silicon, you put a very small seed of silicon in contact with the liquid, and as you pull the seed very slowly away from the liquid, the liquid that's stuck on the seed will crystallize, and as you go you're going to form that large ingot. So just by pulling, if you want to show this slide again, that very big tsunami of silicon was actually hanging from the left hand side, you have a little tip and was pulled very slowly from the silicon melt. Making an ingot like that takes about 3-4 weeks. So it uses a lot of energy too. It does. It took about thousands of degrees. You're melting glass. Exactly. 24-7 for 4 weeks. Right. Exactly. So once you get that ingot, you can slice the ingot into wafers. So I got one here which was part of that ingot and was cut with a special saw, and then it's polished to the atomic level. There's not a single atom that pokes through that layer. I'm not kidding, really. It's atomically flat. Yeah. And then you cut that wafer furthermore into squares because you want to be able to pack as many cell cells as you can. So a circular shape is not ideal. And then you build a couple more layers on top and you get your crystalline silicon cell. But again, very rigid, quite heavy. And you need that much silicon. Oh yeah. You need that much silicon to absorb photons. Yeah. So great electronic material. Not so great for photovoltaics, except if you make... So kind of what's the lifespan of some of these materials? I mean, you see warranties for like five years. Is that it? That's about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I think they would warranty a decline in power for about a person per year for 20 to 25 years after that. I can't really tell you whether or not it's going to drop at 5 or 10 percent or if it's going to continue at that degradation rate. But you see some very old panels out there. For the early solar water heating system, you would see these round silicon wafers as the main sort of panel to drive the pump. And they've been around... I mean, these were probably made in the late 70s or 80s. So can you recycle it? I mean, can you like melt it down again and redo it? Absolutely. So you kind of save something. You can process. Yeah. So we have a lot of PV panels here on Rooftop in Hawaii. They're going to start coming up through... I guess they got a few years ago before they hit their 20, 25 year life. At some point, these are all going to have to be replaced. And they're going to have to be recycled. So the question is, do you want to replace them with the same technology? Like the 40 of PV, which was the silicon maybe 50 years ago, which is what we use? Or do you want to move to new technologies in films or quantum does based on our cells? I mean, there is a lot of very interesting technologies that come out there. And silicon has been the king, again, because all the processes that we use to make silicon cells were actually developed for and by the microelectronic industry. So all the infrastructure and the know-how was there. But as we progress, if you just look at the efficiency of silicon over the past five years, it's been pretty much the same. So it's kind of like incremental progress that we make, whereas you have all the technologies are just booming and we get gaining efficiency of several percent over a few years. Which means a lot. A few percent means a lot. So we're coming up to our time for a break. So we'll take a break now and then we'll come back and talk to Nico Samour. And he's got some more magic to show us. So thanks very much. Thank you. Talk to you after the break. Thank you. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Hello, everyone. This is the Japanese broadcast of Think Tech Hawaii, the Japanese broadcast of the Japanese broadcast of Hello, Hawaii. It's a program that's broadcast from 2 a.m. on every Monday. It's a program that's available in the Japanese community, in the Japanese community, to provide useful help information, news, and so on. Hello, everyone. Please watch it from 2 a.m. on every Monday. Please watch it from 2 a.m. on every Monday. Yeah, otherwise. Okay, here we are back from our break and here we are with Nico. He's got some more magic standing by. So let's see some of this magic on his... We're going to go back to the slide we were on just before the break. Okay. So the second type of technology that's available out there for double takes in complement with the crystalline silicone is what we call the thin films. And so these thin films, again, are about a hundredth of the thickness of human hair. So it's extremely thin. They don't need to be that thick to be good absorber. And the method that we use in my lab and also in other labs to make thin films is to use what we call a vacuum chamber. So what you see on the bottom left is the actual vacuum chamber that we use in my lab. At the very bottom you have crucibles that you can heat up and you put metals in these crucibles. And on the top part you have the substrate. And by sublimating, heating up these metals with the crucibles you form a vapor of element that eventually condenses on the substrate. Okay. And so you can control the thickness of the film, the temperature and grow thin films to our cell this way. So the common denominator between the crystalline silicone technology and the thin film technology is that they both rely on complex processes to make highly pure and highly crystalline absorber. This is really the key. And usually that requires either extreme vacuums or very high temperatures, long processes, complex techniques. And so what we want to do in my lab is to think of a different method, try to make our cells in a cheaper way, easier way and even faster way. And so that's what I'm showing on the next slide. So what we want to do is it falls into the realm of printable electronics. And we want to find a method to actually print the solar cells, like you would print newspapers the same way. But instead of using the vacuum chamber you would just roll the substrate and print with an in-jank printer your solar cell. And that's the technology that we developed at UH in my lab. So you start with an ink that contains a solvent and the raw element that you want, the chemicals. And we essentially spin coat or print this onto a substrate to build up a layer. And just by doing a very quick, about 15 minute annealing in a specific atmosphere. So annealing is like putting it in a heat chamber. Exactly. Fixing it, drying it out. Exactly. We that way form a crystal. Okay. Which is in some cases as good, even sometimes better in terms of crystal size as the material we would get in a vacuum chamber. So we're getting very close to the quality of film that you would get in a vacuum chamber. Is this a special kind of printer? Did you have to design that or can you just use like normal inkjet? So some folks in research lab that actually modify in-jank printers you have to tune the printhead because the ink tends to dry up and it's very difficult to remove the clog. But it's pretty much the same technology. It's pretty much the same. Yeah. And so what you see on the bottom left is the ink that we form. So it's very clear and very stable. We can store that ink for up to a year. And the gray image on the bottom center is actually a cross-section of the cell. And you take that picture using an electron microscope. Exactly. Which we have at UH. We have at UH, exactly. We can do part of the analysis here at UH. And so what you see on the cross-section is that the bottom you have what we call the back contact. The top electrical contact. And in sandwich in between you have the thin films or absorber. Which is again only a micron thick. Right. And so right now the efficiency that we get out of this printhead for our cells is around 7 to 9%. Okay. To give you a point of comparison a very good crystalline cell would give you maybe up to 25%. Okay. A thin films made in vacuum maybe up to 20 to 23%. So right now we're about to a third of the efficiency. But at the fraction of the cost. Okay. So it's always a trade-off. Do you want raw power? Or do you want cheap? I think you would both. We're not there yet. Okay. But that's one avenue to really reduce costs. And print for example your cell on clothings or backpacks or tarps. Interesting. Yeah. Very good. So we have a lot of wasted real estate that could be printed all over. That's right. As long as you can face the sun. Yeah. That's right. Don't build that big apartment building in front of me and shade me out. That's right. Okay. So let's have a look at your next slide. Yeah. So that was for the printable electronics and the PV. Now we're going to move on in the solar fuels. Okay. So if you can show the next slides. As I mentioned earlier there is abundant amount of solar energy. But as we know this is an intermittent source of energy. And unfortunately the demand which is mostly at night is out of phase with the production which is mostly during the day. So if you look at how much PV we have right now worldwide is about 1% or less because of that shift between the demand and the production. So being able to combine storage and PV is really the key to push solar energies into the mix. And there is different way to store energies. The approach that we have in my group is to store solar energies into chemical bonds. So these are the solar fuels. So this is an engineering problem where what you have is a black box which is the process that I'm going to define later. And as an input you have water which we have everywhere. Mostly everywhere. And sunlight. And what you want outside of this black box are products. In our case we are interested in hydrogen H2. But you could form other types of fuels. CH4 or other fuels even by diesel and so forth. That's natural gas, CH4. That's right. And so what you can do with this hydrogen is later on plug that into your hybrid car. Okay. I'm sorry on the fuel cell car which runs on hydrogen drive around. Incidentally we now are able to lease hydrogen cars here in Hawaii from Toyota, Servco. We have just opened their station and just opened up for leasing. That is great. That's wonderful. It has arrived. Finally. That's great. The picture that you see here is actually one of my co-worker that works at Livermore in California and that's his own car. So he gets I think his best is 500 miles. No kidding. 500 and 2 miles out of one charge. On average it's around 350 but he was able to push it to 500 miles. So it must be just coast down. The game was ready to get a record here. That's great. If you can show the slide one more time please. So it's been always the chicken and the egg tuition for hydrogen. You need the infrastructure to get the car on the market. But to get the car you need to have the station there. So it's always been the situation like that. However, there is an industry that is in need for hydrogen is the food industry. Absolutely. And hydrogen is the main precursor in ammonia production which is eventually used into fertilizer. And only in the US we produce about 50 million tons of hydrogen just for the food industry. Let me make a comment here. I know a little bit about ammonia. If it wasn't for ammonia we would all be starving to death. We cannot support the world population that we have because it improves the productivity of the land by a factor of 4. You can grow 4 times as much food on a given acre of land than if you did not have ammonia as a fertilizer. Pretty interesting. Very important. We're not ready to wrap up yet. Where did the time go? I don't know. We can keep going. So on the next slide you'll see the different methods that we have these days to make hydrogen. Either these are fossil fuel based that would be steam method reforming or if you were to plug an electrolyzer straight to the grid you can form hydrogen but that's not the most renewable way to do it. What we want to do is to use renewable forms ideally from solar. So one way to do that would be to connect the electrolyzer to PV's. This is doable but that's probably not the most straightforward way to do it. The way we like to do is to have a device that can directly split water in contact with an electrolyte when the sunlight shines on that material. And if you go to the next slide that explains a little bit the process. So the idea is to somehow mimic the natural photosynthesis and try to make devices that can capture the light and create our fuels. This has to be our last story because we're running out of time and it's been like yeah I was just going to say you need to come back because this is really interesting. We can have like you know Niko too just like one of those big movies. So Niko once again thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day and making the track downtown and coming on our show so appreciate it. Best of luck in your program. You're doing great cool stuff. I love the printing idea. So that's it for today and we will be back next week. I don't know if I can grab Niko next week maybe before everybody forgets what happened on this show but for now we're going to sign off and once again happy Thanksgiving to everybody tomorrow.