Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW)

The ZSW was established in 1988 by the German state of Baden-Württemberg, together with universities, research institutions, and commercial firms. It is a non-profit foundation under the civil code. Solar energy and hydrogen technologies are currently maturing on an industrial scale and will be major components in the sustainable energy supply of the 21st century. As a result, ZSW pursues the following goals and research topics.

The ZSW’s research goals are:

• Research and development of technologies for the sustainable and climate-friendly generation of electricity, heat, and fuel
• Transfer of R&D results to market-relevant products (technology transfer)
• Consulting political decision-makers and professional associations

Today the ZSW has approximately 280 employees and 100 student and scientific assistants and is one of the leading energy research institutes in Europe. Joint ventures and the growing proportion of industry commissions demonstrate the consistent applications relevance of our work.

Current topics are:

• Photovoltaic materials research and development, especially for PV thin-film technologies
• Systems development for PV applications
• Hydrogen technology
• Electrochemical energy conversion and storage
• Fuel cell development and manufacturing
• Renewable fuels and process engineering
• Modelling and simulation
• Grid integration of renewable energy sources and Smart Grid
• Energy economy systems analysis

The Battery Test Centre of ZSW takes part in two projects in the frame work of the supervision project BattNutzung: „Novel Investigation Methods to Battery Safety – NUBase“ and „Accelarated Ageing Tests and Life Time Prognosis – BALd“. The ZSW has the role as project coordinator for the NUBase project. Topics of battery safety and battery ageing of Lithium Ion cells will be addressed with novel approaches in this two projects.

Project participations