SECTION INTRODUCTION: New Technologies & Materials

The need to look beyond business as usual

With a view to forecasting the future of photovoltaics, the PV industry and R&D community are currently involved in many roadmap exercises. A majority of these studies assume that photovoltaics will grow by slowly evolving, more than by rolling out breakthroughs and innovative technologies. Thus, for the coming decade, the forecasts mainly emphasize gains through scaling and manufacturing. The goal, eventually, is to bring the costs of photovoltaic systems down by a factor of two.

From an industrial point of view, this is perfectly understandable. However, these forecasts might lead us to underestimate the potential of future breakthroughs – breakthroughs that will be essential for this highly promising industrial sector of renewable energy, especially if we want to reduce photovoltaics costs even further, say, with an additional factor of two.
The two papers in this issue of Future Photovoltaics are a perfect illustration of novel ideas that may eventually lead to further breakthroughs.

The paper of Gupta et al. from Sandia National Laboratories outlines a marriage between microsystems and photovoltaic cell expertise. Their ideas open up the avenue for the smart exploitation of self-assembly as a way to produce highly efficient PV modules and, eventually, full systems.

The paper of Hunter et al. from Intermolecular, Inc. deals with alternative material systems. These could make non-Si thin film cells a sustainable approach by avoiding the use of scarce materials such as indium. Next to the fundamental study of materials, a particularly attractive element in this paper is the combinatorial approach that is used to verify the relevant properties of a broad range of material compositions. This method may improve the learning speed by one to two orders of magnitude. Approaches as these are deemed to play a growing role in the further rollout of photovoltaics.

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