Meet the Solar System Team – Matthieu Despeisse from CSEM
Meet the Solar System Team – Matthieu Despeisse from CSEM
Matthieu is 41 years young, with a passion and drive for innovation that formed over his many years of work in academia and the PV industry. On joining CSEM, his goal was to directly contribute to the widespread deployment of solar energy in society by supporting companies in their innovative product development. He enjoys working with energetic teams whose diverse backgrounds bring fresh solutions to any technical challenge, and the CSEM team working on the AQUON One project is no exception to this rule; it gathers minds from across Switzerland, France, and India, all bringing together their enthusiasm for solar energy technologies that push innovative boundaries.
CSEM is a Swiss private, non-profit research and technology organization with over 35 years of DeepTech development and transfers to industry. CSEM’s dedicated PV center focuses on advancing technologies and industrial solutions that cover the entire PV value chain, from individual solar cells to full mainstream PV modules, building-integrated PV, and special product applications. Moreover, it specializes in generating customized energy harvesting solutions with high performances that are lightweight for mobility applications and IoT products/sensors.
As well as AQUON One, Matthieu and his colleagues have worked on several other projects that have made a successful sustainable impact, and have helped ensure his vision of widespread, efficient, and durable solar technologies. In particular, they have made key contributions to the successful development and industrialization of high-efficiency silicon heterojunction solar cells and high-reliability SmartWire module technologies. These technologies are about to begin large-scale manufacturing at Meyer Burger’s facilities in Germany, whose objective is to inject a new lease of life into Europe’s PV industry via sustainable products.
CSEM has also worked on creating lightweight PV solutions that can be used as direct energy sources for mobility and transport applications. Take the world’s first commercial two-seater solar plane, SolarStratos; it was outfitted with lightweight PV modules developed by CSEM’s engineers. New PV products created by the same team have also entered the stratosphere with the CNES, the French Space Agency.
Working on AQUON One highlights a new facet where PV could be utilized by the mobility sector. CSEM’s team was fascinated from the start by the exceptional quality standards of the AQUON project, from the ship’s biomimetic design based on manta rays to the pioneering propulsion system – the excellence of which cannot be understated. Everyone involved in the project is driven by a shared conviction that the future of mobility is based on electrical-driven vehicles, powered by efficient solar technologies supported by hydrogen and/or battery systems. As a result, the project’s outcomes reflect this belief. At the same time, CSEM’s team has shown that solar can be durable, cost-effective, and it can drive a new generation of mobility applications, be that cars, planes, trains, or in AQUON One’s case, boats.
We asked Matthieu which places he would like to visit if he were to own AQUON ONE. In his answer, Matthieu explained that he would sail to see manta rays in their natural environment.
Thanks to the ship’s exceptionally quiet propulsion system, getting close to nature without causing detriment to the environment is a real possibility.
The pictures were kindly provided by CSEM.