A New Mexico company has licensed a solar panel project that has been in the works for several years at Western’s Advanced Materials Science and Engineering Center and the University of Washington.
UbiQD, a Los Alamos nanotechnology development company, has exclusively licensed the groundbreaking luminescent solar concentrator technology, which was funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The lightweight solar concentrators are partially transparent, enabling windows or other surfaces to become solar energy collectors.
“We envision a world where sunlight harvesting is ubiquitous, a future where our cities are powered by quantum dot-tinted glass on skyscrapers,” said Hunter McDaniel, founder and CEO of UbiQD.
Western faculty and students have been working for several years on developing the technology through WWU’s AMSEC and collaborating with the UW’s CoMotion Innovation Center.