Today we toured the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy in Freiburg. This is a cutting-edge applied R&D lab that works on government and private industry contracts. They do a lot of photovoltaic work, setting world records for efficiency in different categories. They work on traditional silicon, focused light solar, multi-band PV, thin film, and dye based PV systems. They do work on infrastructure materials as well as solar thermal. We saw a PV production system and got to go into the clean room. After lunch, we toured a biomass gasification reactor and saw a hydrogen powered fuel cell Mercedes. They have installed a hydrogen fueling station that makes hydrogen using PV energy and electrolysis.
We met up with some USC professors and took our host from Fraunhofer out to dinner at Martins Brau, a local brewery. Every single student opted to go to dinner together, so we had a good time. However, after dinner almost everything in Freiburg was closed. Andi and I along with a couple of students got drinks and sat at the train station watching freight trains fly by at 80+ mph just feet away from us.
Andi reports from the pedometer: 6.9 miles, 11 floors, 15,500 steps.
