UPSCALED focuses on environmental technologies that rely on new functional materials and their associated business models, with particular emphasis on circularity analysis for new forms of solar cells.
To address major societal challenges such as the overexploitation of natural resources and emissions of climate-impacting gases, the development and diffusion of new environmental technologies are required. At the same time, the interplay between politics, legislation, markets, and consumer acceptance determines whether such technologies achieve sufficient scale to realise their full potential.
UPSCALED aims to develop a model that can guide the scaling-up of environmentally innovative materials from laboratory scale to industrial scale, as well as to understand market development from niche to mainstream. The focus is on solar cells based on perovskite, a crystal-like semiconductor material undergoing rapid technological development but not yet used on a large scale. These solar cells have considerable potential to contribute to a sustainable and circular energy supply with low climate impact – a demand driven by both the electrification of transport and industry, and geopolitical factors such as the war in Ukraine.
The project addresses two central questions: (i) the contributions and barriers associated with perovskite-based solar cells in a circular and sustainable societal development, and how these contributions can be strengthened and barriers reduced, and (ii) how scaling-up from laboratory level to mass market can be achieved and which business models may be viable.
UPSCALED is based on interdisciplinary work involving technical, environmental, and business analyses. Central to the project are techno-economic and environmental assessments that contribute to product design and identify criteria for sustainable and circular scaling-up. The aim is that the resulting model can also be applied to other functional materials to support their contribution to sustainable societal development.
Project time: 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2028
