Harry Zervos, Power Engineering
The advances in thin film photovoltaics coincide with a very exciting time in the field of electronics and electrics in general as new uses of established technologies (e.g. printing) are leading to the development of new components and products that are cheaper to manufacture, lighter, flexible, bendable, rollable etc. Projections indicate that the market for printed and potentially printed electronics will grow into a $47 billion market by 2018, with thin film photovoltaics (beyond conventional silicon technologies) accounting for approximately $12 billion of that market.
Recently, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced that they have moved closer to creating a thin-film solar cell that can compete with the efficiency of the more common silicon-based solar cell. The CIGS thin-film solar cell recently reached 19.9 percent efficiency in testing at the lab, setting a new world record, as the NREL revealed on March 24th 2008.
This is still far from the highest efficiency achieved in July 2007 by a consortium of researchers led by the University of Delaware (42.8 percent efficiency using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform) but of course, there are big differences in the manufacturing costs of these two technologies as well as the potential fields of application for them.
