The new star in the Cambridge CleanTech firmament – Eight19 – is to raise a further £5 million this summer, Business Weekly can reveal.

The sultan of solar raised £4.5 million in September 2010, some of which is funding the new manufacturing facility to be built at the company’s Cambridge Science Park headquarters in the UK – announced yesterday.

Chief executive Simon Bransfield-Garth told Business Weekly from Abu Dhabi, where the company was attending the World Future Energy Summit: “We expect to raise a further £5 million in the summer.”

2012 looks like being a seminal year for the company.

As reported yesterday, Eight19 has commissioned a new development and manfacturing facility to produce next generation solar solutions. The facility will be the largest in Europe for the development of printed organic solar cells.

By using the new high-speed facility, Eight19 will be able to create low cost solar power generation that will be used in high volume industrial products as well as Eight19’s pay-as-you-go-solar system, known as IndiGo, for off-grid power generation in emerging economies.

Eight19’s IndiGo was launched last year in Kenya and is currently being rolled-out into other parts of Africa and the Indian sub-continent. These products replace poorly performing kerosene lamps which also contribute significantly to ill-health and carbon footprint in emerging economies. According to the World Bank, the replacement market for kerosene lighting is worth over $38 billion world-wide.

Eight19 was founded in 2010 to commercialise the printed organic solar cell technology that was originally developed at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, a world leader in plastic electronics.

Professor Sir Richard Friend, one of the founders of Eight19 said: “Organic solar cell technology is the one of the fastest improving approaches to solar power with peak reported efficiency more than doubling in the last three years. The new facility enables Eight19 to bring this research to practise and develop commercially viable manufacturing for worldwide application.”

Eight19 expects to have its first commercial printed plastic solar modules available in 2013.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Samuel Kimani of Mwiki, Keyna who has installed the IndiGo system in his house