Brite Solar: The Startup That Has Developed Technology To Address The Coming Food Crisis

A Greek Startup with an international reach and high technology is trying to face the challenges of the next thirty years in food production and the environment by optimizing its agricultural production and at the same time reducing the resources it needs, especially in terms of water and energy. For these and many other issues, we spoke with the CEO of Brite Solar , Dr. Nikolaos Kanopoulos.

Can you tell us the story behind the founding of Brite Solar ?

Brite was founded when I returned from the US, after 30 years of study and professional activity there in total. My last job was with Applied Materials, one of the main suppliers of technology and production machinery for photovoltaic panels.

Seeing the energy needs for agriculture and predicting that the next global crisis will be a food crisis, I developed with collaborators such as Ilias Stathatos, a professor at the University of Peloponnese, the idea of transparent photovoltaic panels that can be used in agriculture.

The company was self-financed, as it was the beginning of the financial crisis and the country was a prohibitive risk for any investment. At the beginning our funding was from research (Greek and European) programs and contracts with private individuals for the development of pilot applications. Funding and the incredible bureaucracy of the public administration were the big challenges. Over the past two years we have seen significant improvements in both of these areas and are optimistic about the future.

Have you always been in the field of renewable energy? How did you make the decision to produce in Greece products in this field, when previous efforts, such as Silcio and Solar Cells Hellas for example, failed to stay in this market?

No, I'm an electrical engineer, I specialized in semiconductors and worked for many years in the design and production of integrated circuits. The transition to PV manufacturing, which has relevance to semiconductors at the materials level, happened 12 years ago when I was at Applied Materials.

Your observation about the production of such products in Greece and your reference to the two companies, which I know well, has a basis, because indeed for conventional photovoltaics, the production in Greece cannot compete with the factories in China and India that have a multiple volume production.

This is because there is neither significant technological differentiation in the final product, nor proprietary innovative technology that is unique to the producer. Our belief that the production of our technology in Greece is competitively feasible is based on the fact that we have unique technology and materials that we synthesize ourselves, as well as patents in China, USA and EU that give us legal protection.

Many experts emphasize that the next global crisis will be nutritional. How does this come about?

This claim and strong belief, I must say, is based on recent data announced by the UN economic forum. So there they predict an increase in the Earth's population to 9.7 billion in 2050. To feed this population with today's nutritional data, where by the way 700 million people are malnourished, agricultural production will have to increase by 70-100% in relative to current levels.

This is simply not sustainable with conventional farming methods, because today agriculture consumes 70% of the world's water and 14% of its energy. Early signs of this crisis are starting to become visible today. In California's Salinas Valley, where almost all the locally produced vegetables for the American market are grown, there is a great deal of controversy between farmers and the rest of the citizens over the distribution of water, which is now done on some form of rationing.

Therefore, a technological solution will have to be found to reach the production levels required and do so with little or no impact on the environment, because climate change is further degrading agricultural crops, with millions of tonnes of crops lost every year due to extremes weather phenomena.

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