A start-up company in the United Kingdom wants to cover stadium roofs with solar panels. Solar panels made from cloth. Stretchy cloth.
“The Cambridge, England-based, Solar Cloth Company is beginning to run trials of its solar cloth, which uses lightweight photovoltaic fabric that can be stretched across parking lots or on buildings that can’t hold heavy loads, such as sports stadiums with lightweight, retractable roofs,” Katie Valentine reported for ThinkProgress.org.
The company—which won the 2014 Solar U.K. Industry Awards’ Building-Integrated Photovoltaic Solar Innovation of the Year award—claims there are 320 square miles of U.K. roof space and 135 square miles of U.K. parking space that could be covered with the solar cloth, resulting in enough solar-generated energy to power the U.K.’s grid three times.
The cloth weighs just a little more than seven pounds (compared to almost 50 pounds for standard solar panels), and it’s flexible.
“[The panels] can be laid over almost all low-load bearing structures, and bonded to most structural fabrics to allow application in tensile structures, stadia, and agricultural land covers,” the company said on its website.
Copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) is used as the base technology because of its higher conversion rate and flexibility , the company’s CEO and founder, Perry Carroll, told The Engineer.
“…because CIGS uses a 100 times less semiconducting material than silicon cells, the embedded energy used to manufacture them is less,” Carroll said. “According to the U.S. Department of Energy, assuming a 30 year-life of the solar installation, crystalline silicon PV [photovoltaic] payback time is estimated to be 2-4 years. CIGS PV payback time is estimated to be 1-2 years.”
(Image: Solar Cloth Co.)
