Turning Clothes into Solar Energy Powers Start-Up

It’s hard to make a more personal commitment to renewable energy and reducing the carbon footprint than by wearing clothes and accessories that create solar power.

That’s the business plan behind Salt Lake City, Utah-based Exotic Solar, a start-up that has developed a technology to make cheap and foldable solar panel fabric that can be attached or integrated with clothes to convert the sun’s energy into power.

The company is led by chief executive officer and president Surabhi Pandey, who was a textile designer in India and has a degree in knitwear designing from India’s National Institute of Fashion Technology.

Other team members include chief technical officer Ashutosh Tewari, a tenured associate professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Utah and director of the Nanostructured Materials Research Laboratory there; materials scientist Gene Siegel, a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah who worked with Tewari to develop the technology; and Indian American chief business development officer Vini Joseph.

Exotic Solar’s patent-pending technology miniaturizes and strengthens high efficiency solar cells using ultra-light fiberglass. They are then embedded in a soft polymer matrix to render them flexible.

Silicon, Tewari told India-West in a phone interview, is currently the industry standard semiconductor for fabricating solar cells. “Silicon-based solar cells give 15 to 16 percent efficiency, are very stable and reasonably inexpensive. However, these solar cells are brittle and very fragile. As a result these need to be protected inside metallic frames, which make them very heavy.”

“We take brittle solar cells, cut them into small pieces and put them together on a polymer sheet. They are strong, flexible and light. They can be arranged in patterns and attached to just about anything.”

Pandey told India-West she started the company with about $1.5 million from venture capitalists. Her fashion skill fit perfectly with the technical breakthroughs from the University of Utah researchers.

She said she decided to market the products (see photos) directly to consumers.

“The sun gives us tremendous amount of energy every day,” she told one journal. “If we can convert even a tiny part of that into useful electricity, it will fulfill all our electricity needs. This is the promise, riding on which photovoltaic industry has emerged as one of the fastest growing industry in the world.”

Tiwari, who has Ph.D. in matter physics from IIT-Kanpur, said cables are connected from accessories such as the “sling” product (see photo) and then attached to power batteries on cell phones and devices.

The company is even looking into deploying the technology for water purifiers and solar tents, Pandey added.

Source:http://indiawest.com/news/5718-turning-clothes-into-solar-energy-powers-start-up.html