Solaires shares its newest innovation

Battery-driven devices — such as electric vehicles and smart gadgets — are booming, creating a higher demand for energy to recharge them. Instead of upgrading the power grid, it seems much more efficient to provide each device with the ability to generate its own energy from renewable resources.

This is the key question behind Solaires, the Victoria-based cleantech company developing a material that will better capture solar energy: perovskite. Rather than silicon, Solaires uses the emerging composite to transform clean technologies.

“In order to produce our product, it's a chemical composition — we don’t use any scarce resource,” co-founder Fabian de la Fuente told Victoria Tech Journal. “Our technology is very light, flexible, and translucent; something that silicon cannot be.”

Its newest innovation recycles indoor light to create a renewable energy source:

Solaires is a spinoff from UVic, co-founded by de la Fuente alongside Sahar Sam, the company’s chief science officer. Sam completed her PhD and postdoctoral work at the UVic in materials and mechanical engineering, where she developed transparent and conductive films for applications in touchscreens and solar cells. The company also recently added Sri Peruvemba to the C-suite as CMO.