Enerthing’s high performance light harvesting film

Artificial light in factories, offices and public buildings is an excellent source of energy to power new generations of IoT devices. The main challenge is to convert this light energy to electricity in a highly efficient way.

Our revolutionary technology

Enerthing has solved the problem of tapping into this abundant source of light energy by developing a photovoltaic technology which is

  • Highly efficient at indoor illumination conditions
  • Mechanically flexible and robust to withstand impacts during daily operation
  • produced efficiently by roll-to-roll coating

Manufacturing in Germany

The highly efficient photovoltaic film is our key to a new generation of high performance and  maintenance-free IoT devices. Enerthing team has more than 40 years of expertise in developing and up-scaling of photovoltaic technology. In order to keep the full control of our photovoltaic technology we have set up the volume production at our site in Leverkusen. This capability not only allows us to develop and produce customized photovoltaic modules to our customer needs, it also allows us to develop the next generation photovoltaic film with increased efficiency.

Limitations of battery powered IoT

Power constraint is a dominant design criterium of battery powered IoT devices. It is always a compromise between performance features, like types of sensors, frequency of connectivity, quality of the signal and battery size and cost. Today’s battery powered devices like sensors, Blue-tooth beacons and displays reflect the limitation in performance by service lifetimes of a few years and limitation in transmission rates.

The larger the IoT device deployment is and the wider the spread of devices, the more pressing the questions becomes: “What is the service life of the device and what are the associated costs ? ”

Sustainability

52.000 tons of device batteries were sold only in Germany in 2018. This corresponds to 1.5 Bn batteries in small devices. The fast rise in numbers of IoT applications will lead to an increasing number of battery powered IoT devices, if no alternatives become available. Primary batteries are known for their bad CO2 footprint (up to 1.35kg CO2/AA battery). With Enerthing’s light harvesting technology even under indoor light conditions the use of primary batteries and as a result the emission of CO2 gases can be reduced. With 10.000 m2 of Enerthing’s Photovoltaic film powering IoT devices, 1M AA batteries can be replaced every year resulting in a CO2 saving of 200 tons per year. Enerthing has developed a key technology for a sustainable introduction of new IoT solutions.