FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

...We provide enabling technology to the commercial real estate and construction market. We make photovoltaic coatings that are applied to the glass of windows in commercial buildings and convert those windows to energy-producing solar panels.

...NEXT’s proprietary transparent photovoltaic coating transforms commercial windows into energy-producing solar panels by converting unwanted infrared and UV sunlight into electricity. This fully integrated system can help enable buildings to power themselves with their windows which retain their traditional transparency and performance.

Organic solar cells are commonly made from elements such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, fluorine, oxygen, and sulfur. NEXT’s carbon-based materials are cheap, abundant, and can be easily recycled, leading to organic photovoltaic materials that are lighter, more flexible and cheaper to produce.

Yes. Our semiconducting materials are nontoxic, heavy metal free, and are printed using a low-energy process. The non-proprietary portions of the cell employ materials that are common within the flat glass industry and generally regarded as safe under normal usage conditions and recycled just as easily as regular commercial window glass.

... We have a pre-coated fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO glass) supplied from the glass industry as the bottom electrode. The top transparent electrode is our own proprietary wet coating. Below is a blowup of our device stack: we have a transparent contact directly on glass that’s patterned. We apply a couple of functional layers and then put our active material, then apply a couple of functional layers and our top transparent contact. All of these layers are solution-coated (printed) except for the initial pre-coated transparent contact. We offer dramatically lower costs based on our cost stack (e.g. much lower cost carbon-based materials), and much lower processing and capital costs due to our wet coating process for all the layers.

NEXT’s photovoltaic coatings are applied to commercial windows during the window fabrication process, integrating with existing manufacturers without disrupting established workflows and supply chains. Our technology is enabled by proprietary organic semiconducting materials that are earth-abundant, low-cost, and are coated as an ink in a high-speed, low-cost, and low energy process.

Each window unit will have one wire exiting the IGU and hidden in the horizontal mullions. The buss bars and electrical conductors are adhered to the edge of the glass and hidden behind the window frame. Therefore, you do not see any wiring on the (glass) surface of the window. Below is a picture of a PV-IGU prototype in our lab, with all the wiring and components hidden by the black aluminum frame.

Required infrastructure to distribute energy from individual windows to the building include PV inverter(s), power optimizers, hardware components such as wires, connectors, switches, combiners and transition boxes, and other (non-infrastructure) balance-of-system components such as electrical labor, permits, and other soft costs.

We are using a hybrid distribution model, in which we work directly with major window manufacturers who will collaborate with us in applying our photovoltaic coatings within their existing processes. Those windows will then move through their established supply chains into the market through general contractors.

It doesn't degrade the window's transparency at all, thus preserving occupants’ ability to view the outdoors. NEXT delivers a product with true transparency and uncompromised aesthetics for the sector, designed to match best-selling low-e coatings in terms of color, haze, clarity, visible light transmission (VLT), and solar heat gain performance. This is what will allow large-scale adoption of our coatings in windows and preserve the comfort and well-being of building occupants.

At this point, those who have seen our solution and are interested in it are simply disappointed it is not yet commercially available at scale.

Sorry, but we don’t provide samples. However, you can find us with samples at major glass industry events and trade shows. Don’t think you will bump into us at one of these events in the future? Inquire about becoming a beta collaborator to receive a PV Prototype Window Wall!

NEXT Energy Technologies is a privately-held company at this time. Investors include individual accredited investors, real estate family offices, and strategic industry partners. If you are an accredited investor and interested in learning more, please email us.