Imec and Hasselt spin-off gets €5M to push tandem solar toward factories

Noak, a Belgian spin-off, has seed money to industrialise perovskite-silicon tandem cells with a rear-contact design that uses fewer rare metals.

Noak, a spin-off from the Belgian research hub imec and Hasselt University, has raised €5 million (about $5.6 million) in seed funding. The money is meant to scale and industrialise its perovskite-silicon tandem solar technology. The investors are the Helios Foundation, the Limburg climate investment firm Nuhma, and V2HFin, a subsidiary of Flemish Energy Holding that backs Flemish start-ups.

The technology rests on more than ten years of research at the partners' Institute for Materials Research. It uses a perovskite layer stack with proprietary chemical compositions and scalable deposition techniques. The cell also has a proprietary 3D woven back-contact foil, which moves the electrical connections to the rear. That removes front-side metal, which cuts shading losses, and the partners say it makes material use more efficient and end-of-life recycling easier. The tandem can be split into smaller sub-cells wired in series and parallel, which they say lowers metal use. They also say the foil and tile design sharply reduces expensive and rare metals. The partners report five years of outdoor operation at more than ten test sites in Asia, Europe and North America, covering heat, heavy rain and sub-zero cold.

This matters for abundance because solar cost falls when each cell yields more power from less material, and tandems are one route to that. A design that needs fewer scarce metals, and that CEO Geert Palmers says is meant to be built through global industrial partnerships rather than dependence on a few dominant suppliers, could help make cheap power less fragile.

The caveats are large. The performance and cost claims come from the partners' own statement and are not independently verified. No efficiency figures, commercialisation timeline or production targets were given. The next phase is to show long-term stability and performance at scale, which the partners call key to bankability. Until then this is promising research, not a product.

Source: pv magazine