Europe is looking for its way out of the financial and economic crisis. To make this way sustainable, the EU needs actions and investments that will help the Member States and their Regions to unlock new growth potential and to raise their goals as far as that concerns innovation, productivity and competitiveness.

The new ESIF funding for the period 2014-2020 will amount circa EUR 352 billion. An estimated amount of EUR 110 billion has been earmarked for innovation and low carbon economy for the next seven years. More specifically, this funding should be spent on research, technological development and innovation, ICT, competitiveness of SMEs and the shift towards a low carbon economy.

To make this happen, the EU and its MSs are committed to follow a bottom-up rather than top-down approach. This Innovation investment agenda needs to crafted by a collaborative effort of "entrepreneurial discovery" that involves the private sector and the academic community, building on each regions inherent strengths, entrepreneurship and competitive advantages. Through such a process, the RIS3 (Smart Specialization Strategies) can unleash economic transformation through modernization, diversification or radical innovation in all EU regions.

This is not a "one size fits all" strategy. It is about an innovation-driven, place-based, entrepreneurial discovery process which should drive the EU regions towards higher added value and more knowledge activities. The aim is that every euro spent by the ESIF funds for the next seven years to be strategically targeted and results oriented. Smart specialization should help us to achieve that and even more.

Greece and Cyprus, trapped for long time in unsustainable economic models, are called now to build on their Smart Specialization Strategies and make the maximum impact of the considerable, for their size, assistance they will receive from the ESIF funds for the next seven years.

Georgios Peroulakis is a Senior Desk Officer in EC-DG Regio, since 2001, both in horizontal Units (Evaluation Unit) and in Geographical Units on policy implementation. He is actually working for the Geographic Unit "Greece and Cyprus" since 2009. He is in charge of the Greek OP Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship and coordinator of the smart and sustainable growth activities within this Unit and member of the Core Matrix "smart and sustainable growth" within DG REGIO. He has a Degree in Physics (Greece), in Telematics and Business management from Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and in Business Management from ULB and Ecole de commerce de Solvay.







George E. Georgiou, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Cyprus

Title: Novel Photovoltaic Technologies for Improved Energy Harvesting.

Abstract:

Novel Photovoltaic Technologies for improved energy harvesting Photovoltaic solar energy is expected to see increased penetration, particularly in regions of high solar irradiance such as Southern Europe. The recently revised prediction by the European PV Industry Association (EPIA) states that PV has the potential to supply more than 12% of the electricity energy demand for Europe by 2020. The majority of commercial PV modules utilise crystalline silicon with typical conversion efficiencies below 20%. Efforts to lower costs and improve efficiencies focus on the development and better application of improved PV materials such as in thin film and concentrator PV. New and emerging PV technologies utilise new thin film materials (CIS, CdTe, etc), tandem, organic, dye-sensitised cells and others. Multi-junction cells based on GaAs hold the current official conversion efficiency record at 44.7%.

The wide variety of approaches and the rapid pace of technological progress complicate the comparison between different PV technologies. To tackle these shortfalls, further experience in the field and laboratory, especially for new technologies is urgently required as indicated in the Strategic Research Agenda for PV. Furthermore, reliability, durability and accelerated ageing of new PV technologies are burning questions for the future of the PV industry.

In an attempt to shed light to the above issues, in excess of 30 different PV technologies ranging from fixed system mono crystalline, poly crystalline silicon to amorphous thin film silicon, cadmium telluride (CdTe), CuInSe2, HIT-cell and other high efficiency solar cell technologies from a range of manufacturers such as Sanyo, Solon, SunPower, QCells Wurth Solar, First Solar, TSMC, Tel-Solar etc are currently hosted at our facility and continuously monitored at a very high resolution (one measurement per second). The development and validation of comprehensive and accurate physical and electrical models for the different types of PV systems (with emphasis on new exotic technologies) based on the collected data is then made possible. Accurate models of the key processes involved in the operation of thin film technologies such as spectral response, temperature effects, irradiance and the cycles of degradation and recovery are expected to yield better investigation of the loss processes and performance improvement. Results emanating from our experimental and modelling studies will be presented.

Moreover, Concentrator Photovoltaics (CPV) are seen as a promising route to reducing the cost of solar photovoltaic electricity especially for locations with high direct normal irradiance such as the Mediterranean region. In the final part, our research efforts on new, improved and reliable concentrator systems will be presented, by focusing on the optics, tracking and device characterisation.

Dr George E. Georghiou is currently the leader of PV Technology, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Cyprus. Prior to this, he was a University Lecturer and the undergraduate course leader in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southampton, and a Research Advisor for the Electricity Utilization, University of Cambridge. Having graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA, MEng, MA (1996) all with distinction and a PhD (1999), Dr Georghiou continued his work at the University of Cambridge in the capacity of a Research Fellow (1999-2002). Dr Georghiou is currently a member of the CENELEC and IEC TC82 committees on PV and is acting as an expert evaluator for FP7 energy proposals as well as being a member of CIGRE and the European Solar Energy Industrial Initiative. He also represents Cyprus on the FP7 Energy Committee, the SET plan committee, the European Mirror Group on Photovoltaics and sits on the board of the recently-established Cyprus Energy Agency, which receives its funding from the EU. Dr Georghiou has published over 200 papers in international journals and conference proceedings and his team has obtained research funding in excess of 8 million Euros from bodies such as the European Union, Royal Society, Cambridge-MIT Institute, University of Cambridge, Research Promotion Foundation, Electricity Authority of Cyprus, Cyprus Energy Regulatory Authority, Cyprus Telecommunication Authority, University of Cyprus etc. Amongst his scholarly achievements, are two outstanding paper awards for the most significant technical scientific contributions and an innovation prize.