Illinois has $30 million in incentives available for solar installations on multi-family buildings. 

So far, though, the state program has not received any applications for such projects, according to Jan Gudell, Illinois Solar for All associate director at Elevate, the organization tasked with running the state program. 

In urban areas like Chicago, residents of environmental justice and lower-income neighborhoods are highly likely to live in multi-family residential buildings where it is extremely difficult to install rooftop solar. 

There is little incentive for a landlord to invest in solar that will provide cost savings to the tenants, and rooftops may need significant upgrades to handle solar. In condo buildings, homeowners association bureaucracy and other concerns must be navigated.

There’s also a lesser-known logistical and structural barrier — if solar is to be channeled to individual residential units behind the meter, a separate solar system is essentially needed for each unit — with separate inverters and wiring.

“That’s a lot of hardware, space and cost,” said Aliya Bagewadi, US director of strategic partnerships for Allume Energy, an Australian startup company that says it can address at least this part of the puzzle, by sending energy to individual units with only one inverter and system. 

The company has served thousands of customers in Australia, New Zealand and Europe with its SolShare technology. Now it is rolling out in the U.S., in sunny southern states as well as Illinois, because of the state’s robust solar incentives. 

“It’s inherently an energy equity issue,” said Bagewadi, who is based in Chicago. “We know [multi-family building residents] are much more likely to be lower-income, longer-term renters. We want to make sure those savings flow to people who can really benefit the most.”

Direct benefits 

Illinois isn’t alone in the lack of multi-family solar arrays. Solar developers and advocates have long noted the challenge nationwide, especially for affordable multi-family rental buildings. A 2022 study by Berkeley lab noted that in 2021, about 3% of solar installed in the U.S. was on multi-family buildings, mostly owner-occupied condos. 

“Solar may be a non-starter in a rental multi-family property because the owner may be looking at a complex, expensive and time-consuming process, where they would have to consider the design, permitting, installation, interconnection, and cost for multiple systems,” said Gudell. “For many property owners, this may be unaffordable and unimaginable.” 

A 2018 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that the majority of potential capacity for new solar serving low- and moderate-income customers is on renter-occupied multi-family rooftops. California passed a law in 2015 specifically to address the dearth of solar on multi-family buildings, promising to invest up to $1 billion by 2031.

There are typically several ways to handle rooftop solar on multi-family buildings. 

In rental properties, the building owner can own the array, and use the energy to power common areas, like hallways, a pool or gym. Owners can also allocate a portion of the energy savings to tenants, by charging an amenity fee or otherwise collecting some revenue themselves. 

Alternately, the energy can all be sent back to the grid, in areas with viable net metering policies, and the compensation can be shared with tenants or among condo owners, often referred to as virtual net metering. Community solar offers a similar situation — where the solar isn’t onsite at all, but residents can subscribe to partake in savings. 

Solar advocates, developers, lenders, and policymakers have all been working at state and federal levels to improve opportunities for virtual net metering and community solar. 

These arrangements, however, can still be unattractive or impossible depending on state and utility policy. Community solar isn’t even legal in some states, and virtual net metering depends on utility participation. 

The California law requiring solar on new multi-family construction up to three stories high exempts areas served by utilities that don’t offer virtual net metering.

SolShare avoids these challenges by sending electricity directly from the solar array to individual users, without involving utilities or the grid.

“You can do behind-the-meter with direct benefit to tenants,” said Bagewadi. “We’re physically pushing the electrons to multiple meters.”

Possibilities 

Allume partners with solar installers and developers to help deploy rooftop solar on multi-family buildings, including by working with landlords to design financial structures that benefit both the building owner and tenants. In some cases, Allume acts as the solar developer itself. 

With SolShare, a building owner or manager can allocate energy from a shared solar system, based on unit square footage, in equal amounts, or however they choose. 

Where the technology is deployed in Australia and the UK, energy can be sent to different units on demand, Bagewadi explained. In the U.S., the rollout in Florida and Mississippi is being done with preset amounts that can be changed with 24 hours notice. 

An Allume case study from a 64-unit Orlando apartment building with SolShare notes that a 392-kilowatt rooftop system resulted in savings of almost $100 per month for each unit, with electricity purchased from the grid reduced by almost 60%. While the idea is for residents to use solar behind the meter, excess solar can be sent to the grid. Adding an on-site battery to the mix lets residents use all the power on-site behind the meter, and makes solar power available when the grid is down.

Solar advocates hope the EPA’s $7 billion commitment to the federal equity-focused Solar for All program — separate from Illinois’s state program — will “further unlock multi-family solar,” in Bagewadi’s words.

Gudell said Elevate and other experts know there are many Illinoisans living in multi-family rental buildings that would qualify to have solar installed through Illinois Solar for All. They hope policy and technology evolve to match the available funding. 

“We’ll need a solution that addresses the split incentive problem for rental situations, where the building owner cannot or will not subsidize solar for tenants; and the complexity of bringing solar to multiple electrical accounts at one building,” Gudell said. 

“Adoption of a technology that allows for a single system to be split into shares, for use by multiple electrical account holders, could help in that it would simplify the design, permitting and installation process.”

Startup pitches new model to unlock solar for multi-family buildings, in Illinois and beyond is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Technology accelerator groups in Ohio and Michigan are launching a joint program to bring the benefits of the clean energy transition to more people from underrepresented groups.

BRITE Energy Innovators in Warren, Ohio, and the Centrepolis Accelerator in Southfield, Michigan, plan to combine the strengths of their core programs to help startup clean energy businesses get to commercialization faster. The joint program will particularly focus on recruiting and helping people of color, women, veterans and people with disabilities.

“Not all of the ideas that are needed for us to achieve a sustainable clean energy economy exist right now, so there are huge opportunities and an unprecedented amount of funding right now,” said Jing Lyon, entrepreneur programs director at BRITE.

Both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act provide increased funding opportunities for those communities. So for any entrepreneur looking to get into clean energy technology, especially for historically disadvantaged communities, “this is the right time,” Lyon said.

Drawing on strengths

The Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator, IN², a cleantech program funded by the Wells Fargo Foundation and co-administered by National Renewable Energy Laboratory, announced a $220,000 grant for the program in May. Matching funds will come from the Ohio Third Frontier and the New Economy Initiative in Michigan. 

BRITE plans to use the grant money to provide its 12-week business boot camp program to between 18 and 25 participants in Ohio and Michigan. Aspiring entrepreneurs can complete the virtual program from anywhere, and the goal is for at least 40% of them to come from marginalized or underserved communities. A portion of the funds will also help BRITE engage with a more diverse group of entrepreneurs and connect with additional partners in underserved communities.

Centrepolis will use its share of the grant to support five to eight companies with its Idea to Product accelerator program, including deep-level support for three to five pilot projects or demonstrations in underserved areas. The funding will also help develop content specific to distressed, rural and energy legacy communities and support work with economic development partners in both Michigan and Ohio.

The joint program will draw on the relative strengths of each organization, said Sara Daugherty, chief of staff at BRITE. Both nonprofit groups provide a full range of services to entrepreneurs. But BRITE is especially strong on the front end of initial business planning and fundraising, which includes helping people figure out if their idea has value and identifying the market for it, Daugherty said.

Centrepolis is especially good at helping people with physical products get them ready for investment and commercialization, including prototypes, she continued. Centrepolis also has experts in automotive manufacturing. The clean transportation sector is a focus for both greater Detroit and for Ohio’s “Voltage Valley” in the Youngstown-Warren area.

Alumni of each organization’s programs have included a variety of engineers. But the bulk of the clients lack doctoral degrees, said Centrepolis director Dan Radomski. And a good number of clients don’t even have a university degree, “but have great ideas for physical products [and] cleantech products,” he said.

Connecting with resources

One challenge BRITE has had is making sure people know about its services, Lyon said. Often that calls for working with neighborhood groups or various nonprofits that aim to increase opportunities for women, people of color and other groups, she said.

Additionally, many clients may have expertise in one discipline, “but they don’t have the rest,” Radomski said. His staff at Centrepolis has helped innovators figure out computer-assisted design (CAD) and other equipment to design a product and do other work to get it ready for prototyping.

“Eventually, if they’re going to full-scale production or even a product line, they’ll have to find other partners that are able to do that,” Radomski said. “Physical production takes so much more space.” Then staff at Centrepolis and BRITE can help innovators firm up plans and find funding for that endeavor.

An introduction through the Ohio Fuel Cell Coalition connected Roland Dixon to BRITE. Dixon is a manufacturing engineer who also happens to be Black and a veteran. He had never owned or run a technology business before acquiring rights to technology from a former employer and starting a remote generator company called Special Power Sources, in Alliance, Ohio.

“They’re like a bridge that can tie us together to help us understand not only how to understand how a business runs, but how to keep it in business when times get tough,” Dixon said. “And times do get tough in small businesses.” 

He credits BRITE with helping him get some of the funding for his company, including a grant from JobsOhio.

“Not every idea that comes to us is a good idea, of course,” Radomski said. “There’s quite a lot of vetting.” First: has it been done before? Second, are there potential customers? And third, is that market viable — “meaning you can produce at the right price point,” he explained.

Some clients also need to learn or brush up on how to do presentations and other tasks. In that case, Centrepolis and BRITE help people connect with other resources.

One of Ohio’s Minority Business Assistance Centers is at BRITE’s location, and another is in Youngstown, for example. State certification programs there and at other centers help increase the number of qualified competitors who can bid on various projects.

Other resources offered through the centers “include technical and professional assistance, access to capital, surety bonding, and more,” said spokesperson Sarah Wickham at the Ohio Department of Development. “In the past two years there were 132 clients counseled, 94 hours of counseling hours, and $334,700 capital infusion for Trumbull county,” which includes Warren and Youngstown, she said.

Diversity matters

Fairness and equity call for providing support for all entrepreneurs, particularly ones who are from underserved backgrounds and communities. Business reasons also provide strong incentives for supporting startups with diverse leadership.

Startups with diverse leadership teams “are proven to be able to raise more from and return more capital to investors than those formed by all-White teams,” Daugherty said. As support, she cited a 2020 analysis by the Kauffman Fellows Research Center.

That paper found that while businesses with White founders and executive teams raised venture capital more often, founders of color who successfully raise capital tend to get more in total from all rounds of funding. That’s particularly the case when projects get to their later stages. And when investors do get cash back, they tend to earn a higher return from businesses with diverse teams.

“Diversity also brings greater creativity and new problem-solving capabilities,” Daugherty said. A 2020 report by McKinsey & Company also found that the relationship between diversity in companies’ leadership teams and better financial performance has grown stronger over time.

BRITE and Centrepolis hope to kick off the joint program in July. But each group continues to offer its services to innovators and entrepreneurs before then. And prospective clients don’t need to have their ideas fully developed before approaching either group for help.

“Just have a conversation with us,” Lyon said. “Don’t think that you’re too early. You never know how we can help you until we have a conversation with you.”

Ohio and Michigan groups aim to boost underrepresented entrepreneurs in clean energy is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A St. Paul, Minnesota, startup company is developing an energy storage system to help businesses lower their utility bills and keep the lights on during power outages.

Vessyll was founded in 2020 by Adam and Zahra Iliff, who moved to the Twin Cities after deciding they wanted to raise their family in the Midwest. The company was recently selected to participate in a regional clean energy accelerator program and is deploying its first system this month as part of a pilot project on a northern California microgrid.

The U.S. energy storage sector is an estimated $7.5 billion annual market with several big-name players such as Tesla, Toshiba and Siemens already holding a stake. Most of the activity has been around large battery systems designed to help utilities manage the electric grid as they also install more variable wind and solar generation.

Where Vessyll sees an opportunity is in the middle tier — bigger than Tesla’s residential Powerwall but smaller than utility-scale systems — in a niche that includes commercial and industrial customers, as well as some larger residential uses.

“Vessyll is ahead of the curve [for a sector] that will grow exponentially, and they have an absolute chance to be a player in it,” said Nina Axelson, president of Grid Catalyst, the Twin Cities-based startup incubator that selected Vessyll this spring as part of its first cohort.

Adam previously worked as a senior project manager in Tesla’s battery division, where he became a student of the technology. His experience there led him and Zahra to try to design an easy-to-use battery system that wouldn’t require much work by contractors to install or set up.

The result is the Vessyll, which holds up to 46.5 kilowatt-hours of power, more than three times the storage of Tesla’s Powerwall. Tesla discontinued its mid-sized Powerpack product last year and now focuses on smaller residential systems and larger utility systems.

“Vessyll is a plug-and-play device that holds more power than other batteries” that target the commercial and residential markets, he said. “We’ve also developed what we call our ‘secret sauce,’ which is the energy management system built into the battery.”

Initially, Adam and Zahra had no preference for the type of battery technology. However, after speaking with scientists and other experts, they chose lithium iron phosphate technology because it uses a water electrolyte that is less prone to fire risk than the chemical electrolyte found in lithium-ion, Zahra said.

The couple also liked that the technology has been around for years and costs less than lithium-ion batteries because it requires significantly less nickel and cobalt. One downside is that it is less energy dense and requires more physical space than lithium-ion technology. 

Adam hopes Vessyll could someday tap Minnesota’s iron ore industry for materials, which he said operates in a much better regulatory environment than other countries. “We’re trying to stay away from child labor and African mining,” he said.

The Vessyll’s controls, he said, offer greater sophistication than other energy storage devices. He said the power output is three to four times faster than competitors, and the software can more precisely transfer stored energy to match building loads.

The first Vessyll pilot begins this month at the Colusa Indian Community in northern California. The tribe has a casino, resort and residences powered partly by large solar arrays functioning within a microgrid. Vessyll will provide uninterruptible power during outages, offering the tribe enough time to start diesel generators capable of providing backup electricity for hours, Adam said.

Bruce Geveden, owner of California-based Geveden Industrial Inc., will install a Vessyll on the tribe’s land. Geveden has known Adam since his years at Tesla and he likes Vessyll’s technology and size. Energy storage has become more popular as California’s utilities have moved to use time-of-use pricing.

“Batteries have become important over the past couple of years to reduce demand charges,” Geveden said.

Adam said Vessyll will ship five units in the third quarter of this year and 15 devices in the first quarter of 2024. Clients pay upfront for batteries before they receive the delivery.

Vessyll builds the systems at the University Enterprise Labs near the University of Minnesota. The long-term dream is to create a factory that would employ 1,500 people and produce a gigawatt of storage annually. For now, Adam has not given up his day job working for a San Francisco solar company, nor has Zahra.

In the short term, Adam said that if he can move to a manufacturing facility, the lead time needed to produce a Vessyll will go from 26 weeks to six to eight weeks. A dedicated manufacturing space with materials on hand “would be fantastic,” he said.

Aaron Hanson, energy program specialist at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, said for commercial and residential customers batteries could become more valuable than just backup power as utilities move toward time-of-use pricing. Customers with energy storage will have an easier time shifting electricity use to hours when rates are lower, potentially shaving their utility bills.

Hanson added that battery storage needs more diversity of materials in technological applications. 

“We need more than one approach in battery storage technology,” he said. “It will be interesting to see how this technology performs.”

St. Paul battery startup sees promise in helping businesses manage power is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A once-novel solar power technology with Ohio roots is having a moment in the sun, along with two Toledo-area manufacturers.

Scientists had experimented with cadmium telluride solar panels in the lab since the 1950s, but the technology was commercialized just two decades ago after important groundwork by a pair of Ohio entrepreneurs who founded what would eventually become First Solar.

After years of fighting for a niche next to cheaper and more efficient crystalline silicon solar cells, cadmium telluride has recently closed the gap on cost and energy output. Cadmium telluride panels hold the largest worldwide market share among thin-film solar technologies, which use very thin layers of semiconductor material, versus thicker rigid crystalline silicon. 

On top of technological advances, the sector is poised to benefit from ongoing supply chain politics and new federal climate change legislation that incentivizes domestic manufacturing.

Those trends are fueling a solar manufacturing boom in Ohio, where despite hostile state and local policies against solar farms, two cadmium telluride manufacturers have announced major expansions that promise to add hundreds of jobs in the coming years.

First Solar plans to open its third Ohio factory later this year in Lake Township. That 3.3-gigawatt plant will be followed by a 1.3-million-square-foot research and development facility in Perrysburg, slated to open next year. Plans call for a fourth U.S. factory to open in Alabama in 2025, bringing the company’s total U.S. production capacity to roughly 10 GW.

Meanwhile, Toledo Solar, whose panels go mainly to commercial and residential users, is tripling its production capacity from 100 to 300 megawatts this year. Although the company is much smaller than First Solar, which targets the utility-scale market, “that’s a big deal for us,” said CEO Aaron Bates.

“The Toledo area, with its deep ties to the glass industry, was a natural incubator in the early years of our business,” said Kuntal Kumar Verma, chief manufacturing officer for First Solar. More than 20 years later, northwestern Ohio “is home to a pool of thin-film solar manufacturing knowledge that is perhaps unparalleled anywhere in the world.”

Why Ohio?

The cadmium telluride solar sector’s origin story in Ohio starts with two superheroes of the glass industry.

Harold McMaster grew up as a farm boy in northwestern Ohio, and Norman Nitschke spent his boyhood in East Toledo. The two pioneered the manufacture and use of tempered glass — the stuff used for car windshields so it won’t break into jagged shards. They became co-founders of several companies, including Glasstech.

McMaster and Nitschke then began working on solar energy through Glasstech Solar. That work led to Solar Cells, Inc. Under McMaster’s leadership, the company developed the basic vapor deposition process for its cadmium telluride solar cells in 1997.  

The process uses hot gas to crystalize a layer of cadmium telluride whose thickness measures roughly 3% of a human hair. That layer, glass and other materials make up the solar panel’s “sandwich.” Production takes less time than that for crystalline silicon panels, which represent the majority of solar panels used worldwide.

After the sale of a controlling interest in the company to an Arizona-based investment firm, Solar Cells, Inc. became First Solar in 1999 and opened its first manufacturing plant in Perrysburg. 

Yet it took years before the cells’ efficiency improved enough to become competitive. In 2016, First Solar achieved an energy conversion efficiency of 22% in the lab. A 2019 study by company scientists and research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory refined on that work, reducing the risk of instabilities that could lessen efficiency.

Toledo Solar chose the Toledo area when it started up in 2019, so it could capitalize on the knowledge base built up by First Solar and nearby universities. Starting elsewhere would have been “such a lift, and it would be so expensive,” Bates said.  

Now cadmium telluride solar is a proven technology, and it’s competitive with crystalline silicon, said scientist Lorelle Mansfield at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “It’s in the field. It’s utility-scale. It’s out there, and it’s working well,” she said.

The cadmium telluride sector currently supplies roughly 40% of the U.S. utility-scale market and about 5% of the worldwide market, according to the U.S. Manufacturing of Advanced Cadmium Telluride Photovoltaics Consortium, or US-MAC. Members include various companies, universities and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.  

A Global Market Estimates report released in January projected that the global cadmium telluride market would grow at a compound annual rate of 12.5% from 2023 to 2028 as the energy transition continues. 

Head-to-head

Although First Solar and Toledo Solar don’t compete with each other, they and other cadmium telluride companies in the global market do compete with crystalline silicon.

By late 2020, First Solar reported an average efficiency rate of 18% for its commercial modules. That’s at the low end of the 18% to 22% range the Department of Energy has reported for crystalline solar panels.

However, cadmium telluride can “deliver up to 4% more energy in hot climates and up to an additional 4% more energy in high humidity,” Verma noted. The theoretical efficiency of cadmium telluride panels is also higher — more than 30%. That’s because the semiconductor layer can respond to a wider range of light energy, Bates said.

Cadmium telluride panels also offer cost savings in production because they require less materials, less energy and less water. NREL research confirmed last year that they’re less carbon-intensive than crystalline solar.

Mansfield noted an additional big advantage the cadmium telluride sector has right now: “It’s a thin-film technology that’s made in the U.S.”

“There’s a lot of advantage to that,” said Jane Harf, executive director for Green Energy Ohio. The companies are less vulnerable to foreign supply chain interruptions.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. companies in the crystalline silicon sector faced supply chain problems because of China’s global dominance in making the semiconductors they use. The country’s violation of anti-dumping rules triggered restrictive tariffs during the Trump administration. The Breakthrough Institute and others have also criticized China for using forced labor and other unfair labor practices.

Last June, President Joe Biden announced a 24-month reprieve from certain import duties for solar modules and cells coming from Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. The goal was to supply the U.S. solar market until domestic production of crystalline silicon semiconductors can ramp up.

A preliminary finding from the Commerce Department in December found some circumvention of the trade restrictions in all four Southeast Asian countries. Basically, companies were shipping Chinese products to the U.S. after just minor additional processing. That suggests imports for the crystalline silicon sector could become more challenging after June 2024, although the 2022 federal CHIPS Act aims to increase domestic production of semiconductors.

For now, all-domestic production means Toledo Solar is the only company in the rooftop solar market that can qualify for the full 40% tax credit under the Inflation Reduction Act, Bates said.

The cadmium telluride sector isn’t immune from potential supply chain issues. However, Mansfield said, the amount of semiconductor materials needed per panel is small. And better ways to refine the feedstocks could maximize their supply, she added.

“We’re essentially taking two byproducts from mining waste streams — cadmium and tellurium — and combining them into a stable compound,” Verma said. At the end of their useful life, more than 90% of the modules’ materials can be recovered.

Gains for Ohio

First Solar expects its Lake Township plant will provide 700 jobs in addition to the 1,600 jobs at its existing Ohio facilities. Plans call for the research and development facility to create another 200 jobs. Toledo Solar anticipates it will create more than 250 new jobs by 2027.

The two companies’ growth also attracts other businesses to Ohio. NSG Pilkington opened a new float glass line in Luckey in 2020, creating about 150 new jobs

And Ice Industries announced last year it will build a 150,000-square-foot plant in Bowling Green to make steel back rails for solar panels, providing about 120 new jobs.

The US-MAC consortium hopes to address ongoing challenges. There’s still a lot of room to improve cadmium telluride panels’ efficiency up to their theoretical limit, Mansfield said. Other elements of the panels can be enhanced as well.

The sector may face more competition from the crystalline silicon market as domestic semiconductor production ramps up or due to other advances. Other thin-film technologies could also pose competition. Researchers are also working on solar cells with stacked semiconductor layers that respond to different bandwidths of energy, Mansfield said.

Then there are perovskite solar cells, which can be printed or painted onto surfaces. A Feb. 16 study in the journal Science reported that perovskite solar cells with a bit of an added compound, called DPPP, maintained an efficiency of 23% over the course of two months until the study period ended.

Although multiple challenges remain, “perovskite solar cells may start making it to market in a few years,” said study co-author Yanfa Yan at the University of Toledo.

Politics could also affect how much future growth in the cadmium telluride sector stays in Ohio.  

Solar energy is “still a political issue. And to me, it shouldn’t be,” Bates said. “It’s an economic issue.” In his view, state policymakers should appreciate and support Ohio’s leadership role in solar panel manufacturing.

“This is the center of the Western Hemisphere — full stop — for solar,” Bates said.

Made-in-Ohio solar panels benefit from federal incentives, supply chain politics is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A new material developed in Massachusetts could someday help make super-efficient windows more affordable for home and business owners. 

A Cambridge startup called AeroShield has developed a clear, lightweight material that, when sandwiched between two panes of glass, produces windows that are more insulating than even bulkier, more expensive options.

Early research by the company indicates that windows incorporating its material could cut residential heating and cooling costs by 20%. The first prototypes could be installed in demonstration projects by the end of 2022, and products could hit the wider market in 2023 or 2024.

“We’re really excited by a change we could start in the industry by enabling some better designs and some better products,” said co-founder Elise Strobach.

As the country grapples with the urgent need to lower greenhouse gas emissions, the energy consumption of buildings is a key problem to solve. Fossil fuel combustion in buildings accounted for about 29% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States in 2018, according to a report from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a Virginia-based climate and clean energy nonprofit.

Lowering these emissions will require switching from fossil fuels to electricity wherever possible, generating cleaner electricity on the grid, and reducing overall power usage. And a key strategy for decreasing energy consumption is to create extremely tight building envelopes. 

Windows, however, have always posed a challenge to achieving high levels of efficiency: Heat lost or gained through windows is responsible for up to 30% of the energy used to heat or cool a home, the federal Department of Energy estimates.

The vast majority of windows sold in the United States are double-glazed, meaning they are constructed of two panes of glass with a thin space between them filled with air or another gas. These windows are highly efficient, but there is general consensus that windows will need to perform even better to meet climate and energy goals. Triple-glazed windows are an energy-saving step up but significantly bulkier and more expensive than the standard double-glazed window.

Researchers have been attempting to develop even more efficient windows in several ways, said Stephen Selkowitz, a building materials scientist who spent 40 years working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Some are trying various combinations of gas between panes and thin coatings on the glass. Others are trying to remove all the air from between panes, creating an insulating vacuum in the middle of the window. 

Strobach expects AeroShield will allow double-glazed windows to be more insulating than triple-glazed, but with a lighter weight and a lower price. AeroShield windows might also be more resilient than vacuum-sealed windows, which would lose most of their thermal impact if even a small crack in a pane broke the vacuum.

“It’s not too much to say that they are basically revolutionizing window technology — if you can make this product commercial-ready, you can really change the game,” said Emily Reichert, chief executive of Greentown Labs, a technology incubator where AeroShield has done much of its work. 

Getting the glass right

AeroShield began with research Strobach conducted for her doctorate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, searching for ways to better insulate solar panels so they would generate power more efficiently. She looked to silica aerogel which, despite what its name suggests, is not sticky or oozy. It is a very light, highly porous solid glass that is such a good insulator that NASA has used it to protect critical equipment. 

First invented in 1931, aerogels are not a new technology. However, silica aerogel has always been a cloudy, pale blue color, too opaque to let sufficient sunlight pass through to solar panels. Strobach’s goal was to figure out how to make the material transparent. 

“It’s one of the most insulating materials in the world,” Strobach said. “But it had never been clear.”

Her research succeeded even beyond her original goal. The material she created not only let adequate sunlight pass, but it was also clear enough to see through. Essentially, she explained, her team made nanoparticles of glass and the pores between them smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so, in the final material, the light doesn’t interact with the material. 

The effect of the extremely tiny particles and pores, she explained, is similar to walking through rain: Small raindrops with ample space between them provide essentially no resistance to the moving body.

This unexpected level of transparency got Strobach and her fellow researchers thinking about other possible applications for her aerogel. That’s when they had the idea of sandwiching it inside double-paned windows to super-charge their insulating qualities. 

Strobach switched the focus of her doctoral work to optimize the aerogel for windows and began to think about the logistics of manufacturing and selling the material. As she talked to people in the window industry, she realized she was on to something. 

“The industry was very open to sharing the problems that they’d faced,” she said. “Not only is this a problem we could solve, but it’s a really tough problem to solve without us.”

Strobach and business partner Kyle Wilke launched AeroShield at the end of 2019, shortly before Strobach completed her Ph.D. in early 2020. The company immediately attracted the attention of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a quasi-public agency that helps fund and support clean energy businesses in the state. Since 2019, the clean energy center has awarded the company more than $400,000 in grants to support the development of prototypes, to help it stay afloat during the pandemic-induced economic downturn, and to start scaling up its manufacturing process.

“She is coming out with top-tier science,” said Ariel Horowitz, senior program director at the clean energy center. “[Windows] wouldn’t necessarily strike you as a sexy application, but it is so impactful — so needed.”

Going to market

In 2020, AeroShield joined the incubator space at Greentown Labs, received a $256,000 National Science Foundation grant, and was selected for an Activate fellowship, which helps support technology entrepreneurs as they turn their research into businesses. Most recently, the company was selected to participate in the Healthy Buildings Challenge, a program to nurture businesses that aim to create more comfortable and environmentally friendly buildings. The funding from the challenge will help Aeroshield plan its production launch. 

“They’re commercializing a lot faster than we would have expected for a manufactured building material,” Horowitz said.

Still, hurdles remain before AeroShield can make it to market. 

Regularly producing sheets of the aerogel — which is very fragile — in the sizes necessary for windows has been an early challenge. However, the company has recently developed a process for successfully producing intact sheets of its material that are 20 inches by 14 inches, an industry-standard window size. 

The next step is to work with industry partners to put these sheets in actual windows and do rigorous testing to validate the durability and thermal qualities of the material, Strobach said.

She expects AeroShield to end up working with the manufacturers who make the glass panes for windows, rather than the companies that build the full windows, including sash and frame. Her reasons are both practical and environmental. 

“The first partner we need is the person making insulated glass,” she said. “The most energy-efficient way to make things better seems like it’s to use the knowledge and the equipment we’ve got.” 

The market for highly efficient windows, however, could be tricky, said Rick Dunn, product manager of emerging technologies for the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. 

Often, when presented with new energy-saving technologies, manufacturers can be reluctant to devote too much money and equipment to a product without a proven level of demand. By producing only a small amount of a new product, however, they keep prices high, which lowers demand. Breaking that cycle is a challenge for any new entrant offering energy-efficient building materials, Dunn said. 

Eventually, though, outside forces will help drive demand, he noted. Building codes in many places are slowly starting to call for greater energy efficiency, and the federal EnergyStar program is in the process of raising its performance standards for insulating windows.

For now, AeroShield will be focusing on getting to market with windows for residential buildings, but Strobach envisions a future in which the material will be standard for windows of all types.

“I think AeroShield hopes one day to be a part of all new windows,” she said. “When we talk about our energy technology, we do see it as the piece of a bigger puzzle.”

Massachusetts startup sees path to more efficient windows with new material is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.