Suntex
Pauline van Dongen
Pauline van Dongen has developed a lightweight, solar-powered textile called SUNTEX. This innovative material offers architects and designers the opportunity to create energy-generating surfaces for a variety of applications, including facade fabrics, festival tents and awnings.
In the Netherlands, buildings collectively have approximately 2,200 square kilometres of facade surface, of which 660 square kilometres are suitable for generating solar energy. As the country strives to become more climate-neutral, or even climatie-positive in the coming years, the facade offers an excellent opportunity especially for tall buildings or those that lack the load-bearing capacity needed for traditional solar panels.
We spoke with Pauline about her transition from fashion designer to creator of technical textiles, and how her innovative product can raise awareness about contemporary energy consumption.
Photography: Anouk Moerman
Hi Pauline, what is your passion as a designer and where does it originate from?
My passion for design started when I was growing up. My mother is very creative and always worked with textiles, making her own clothes and letting me help her. My father is a doctor and from him I inherited a fascination for the human body. This, combined with my love for clothing, has led me to appreciate the way clothing can be used to express oneself.
I studied fashion design at the Arnhem fashion academy and during an internship at H&M, I was exposed to the fast fashion system, which I immediately disliked. I saw first hand how clothing loses its value and meaning through mass production and overconsumption as well as the fashion industry’s destructive impact on the earth and its depletion of raw materials. This led to my commitment of designing meaningful clothing and textiles that tell a story.
Besides my creative interests, I always enjoyed science subjects. During my education, I was already exploring new techniques like 3D printing, laser cutting. After my studies I started incorporating solar cells into clothing and textiles. By doing so, I wanted to present a mirror to people regarding sustainability and social issues, such as energy consumption.
You started out as a fashion designer and gradually got more involved in textile innovations. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
At the time, this was in 2012, I came into contact with a community that was working intensively on wearable technology. These are items of clothing that incorporate technology to, for example, measure your heart rate or generate energy. During this time, smartphones were becoming increasingly popular, but their high power consumption posed challenges for users, such as dead batteries and the need for frequent charging. That gave me an idea: what if we could integrate solar cells into clothing? Then, in theory, you could be self-sufficient.
I subsequently designed the Wearable Solar Dress, which could generate its own energy. The dress attracted significant publicity, but, at that time, the field of technology and clothing was still in its early stages. I created that first dress using available solar cells, which required soldering 72 individual elements together with wire. This made the dress difficult to produce and not particularly comfortable to wear. Nonetheless, the dress effectively told a story about our energy use, demonstrating how much power even a small device like a smartphone requires.
Are you still creating wearables?
I noticed that while there was a lot of interest in the possibilities of solar energy and clothing, it proved difficult to actually bring this to the market. The market wasn’t ready for it, as many people found it daunting to wear clothes with embedded electronics and the price was also a major factor, as solar cells are costly, making a T-shirt with a hundred solar cells very expensive.
In 2013, I was asked to investigate the potential and value of smart fashion and textiles, including solar textiles, as part of a PhD at TU Eindhoven. This is when I started looking at the possibilities more broadly. The past ten years I have developed a series of solar products, like a T-shirt, a windbreake and a backpack. In the end, I saw a lot of potential in the application of solar textile in architecture. It’s a much bigger scale than the human body.
The most frequently asked question of us is: how much energy can you generate?
Can you take us through what you think could be improved in the world of solar energy?
To combat climate change, we must reduce fossil fuels, such as gas or oil. Making our living environments climate-proof is a big task ahead of us, and sustainably generated energy, like solar power, plays an important role. But the current range of solar energy products are primarily limited to large, heavy solar panels. They have a relatively narrow application potential, mainly focused on roofs, not facades.
In the Netherlands, buildings collectively have approximately 2,200 square kilometres of facade surface, of which 660 square kilometres are suitable for generating solar energy. As the country strives to become climate-neutral, or even climate-positieve, in the coming years, the facade offers an excellent opportunity especially for tall buildings or those that lack the load-bearing capacity needed for traditional solar panels.
In addition to energy generation, solar textiles can help address the issue of urban heat. During the summer, cities can be up to 8 degrees Celsius hotter than places with more green areas, increasing the demand for shade. By bringing the worlds of solar energy and textiles together, we can create more energy-generating surfaces and provide much-needed shade.
What kind of textile products are you designing to generate solar energy in the urban environment?
The world of solar energy has advanced to the point where solar cells are getting increasingly smaller and thinner. This has opened up new possibilities for incorporating solar energy into textiles. Since 2021, I have been working on SUNTEX, a lightweight and energy-generating textile with woven-in solar cells. In my studio Anna Wetzel is the driving force behind the weaving of the textiles, and we work closely with Tentech, a design and consultancy firm for lightweight constructions.
SUNTEX is particularly suitable for outdoor applications due to its use of thin-film solar cells. This extremely thin material can be bent and rolled up, making it versatile for various applications. It can be used for spatial designs, such as tents and pavilions, as well as flat surfaces like facade linings, canopies and shade structures.
What is the key quality of your product compared to current offerings?
Developing SUNTEX required collaboration with a network of partners, including experts, universities and companies such as TU Eindhoven, TU Delft, Solliance and TNO. Together, we’ve created a product that makes it possible for designers and architects to incorporate solar energy into their designs, which we call solar design.
We provide designers with a material that makes them happy, and that allows them to make many more surfaces energy-generating than was previously possible. Like clothing, we can vary the thread colour, thickness and other properties of the yarn to, for example, make textiles that are more densely woven or semi-transparent, better meeting specific market needs.
We offer variety and design opportunities to traditional and uniform solar panels in the current market. In contrast to heavy and rigid solar panels that are primarily suited for roofs, SUNTEX is lightweight, flexible, and customisable. This enables designers to work more creatively and spatially and to create a wider range of applications.
So you're offering a solution that's more aesthetically pleasing and more widely applicable than solar panels. What about the energy it produces?
The most frequently asked question of us is: how much energy can you generate? This was already the case when I designed the solar dress. In the world of solar energy, there’s a tendency to focus solely on the functionality and efficiency of solar cells, but I find that a very limited perspective. SUNTEX’s broader applicability and ability to be used in places where you can't currently install solar panels is a significant advantage.
But to answer the question: we use existing solar technology, we don’t develop this ourselves. The ‘OPV’, or organic photovoltaic solar cells that we currently use produce around 50W per square meter. There is still a lot of development in OPV, so the efficiency will improve a lot the coming years.
To me it is important that you can make an incredibly efficient solar cell, but if it is very heavy, stiff and ugly, the application possibilities are limited. Nobody is particularly enthusiastic with the current range of dark, heavy solar panels and for solar energy to become widely accepted and integrated, it’s essential to offer a variety of materials and make it aesthetically pleasing. SUNTEX allows people to choose from different colours and textures, making solar energy a more natural part of our lives.
We can create much more energy-generating surfaces.
While solar energy may be sustainable, the production of solar cells is not necessarily so. In what ways do you envision growth and circularity?
We carefully consider the materials we choose and how SUNTEX can be recycled. Traditional solar panels are glued and there are often toxic metals in them, such as fluorine, lead and cadmium. Little research has been done on how to recycle these panels, so we are heading for a huge waste problem.
SUNTEX’s thin-film solar cells are more sustainable to produce because they are lightweight and require fewer raw materials and energy. They are also made from organic elements such as carbon and hydrogen. The solar cells are tightly woven into the textile, so they stay in place, and because we don’t use glue, it’s possible to recycle the fabric and the integrated electronics separately at the end of their functional life.
What is the commercial viability of your product in today's market?
SUNTEX is designed for use by constructors and architects in outdoor environments, so it must meet specific requirements such as being super-strong, water-repellent, wind-resistant, UV-resistant and flame-resistant. This is exciting research! And after three years of deveopment, we are now ready to apply SUNTEX in trial runs.
We recently participated in the tender procedure for the Dutch pavilion for the World Expo 2025 in Osaka. In the pavilion designed by Overtreders W, SUNTEX was used as an energy-generating facade material. Although we came in second place, the project demonstrated how you can design a colourful, energy-generating facade with our material.
We are now working on a new project: a Solar Sculpture to show how SUNTEX can be an innovative solution to extreme heat in urban areas. By providing shaded areas, SUNTEX can help reduce heat stress. We are currently looking for partners to support this pilot project financially in the city centre of Arnhem.
So you’re looking for partners to demonstrate and test SUNTEX on a larger scale in public spaces. What is your vision for the future and what do you need to get there?
Our goal is to scale up SUNTEX for larger architectural projects like facade fabrics and festival tents. We are currently weaving SUNTEX on a loom with a width of fifty centimetres. Our next step is to transition to industrial machines with a minimum weaving width of 150 centimetres. To achieve this we will work with a number of European partners, including Danish and German ones.
SUNTEX of course wants to be a successful company and we need the right people on board for that. While my strength is in conceiving, designing, developing and driving new ideas, I prefer to leave the aspects of running a company to experts in those areas. So I am looking for entrepreneurial minds and collaborations to manage the business, improve the technology and develop propositions. As a solar designer, I can focus on material research and exploring and designing applications.
Finally, what is your appeal to readers, what message do you want people to remember?
With my work, I want to give people a different perspective on solar energy and raise awareness about energy consumption through tangible interactions with solar technology. I also hope to demonstrate that our relationship with the sun is abundant and offers us so much more than energy alone. It can bring us together, inspire us and reconnect us with nature. This relationship with the sun creates a certain humility in both users and also for designers. I think that’s a beautifully sustainable value to live and work by.
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