Introduction: Manufacturing: Equipment & Materials

These are tough times for most of the PV industry. In tough times, both cost reduction and product differentiation are a matter of life and death. There continues to be a parade of announcements from industry leaders and would-be leaders featuring record efficiencies and new innovations in cell processing toward higher efficiency and lower costs.

Selective emitter technology remains a key area of focus. There are now at least six competing approaches to creating selective emitter crystalline silicon devices that are commercially available. Other high- and higher-efficiency cell concepts similarly benefit from an ability to precisely, repeatedly and controllably dope targeted regions on the front and/or back of the solar cell. Fraunhofer ISE is a global leader in crystalline silicon solar cell technology, and Dr. Granek and his colleagues from Fraunhofer report here on their latest progress in the use of liquid-jet-guided lasers for laser chemical processing. They are now at the critical stage of optimizing the technology for manufacturability and cost (yield, consumables, etc.) as well as pushing the technology toward new cell concepts with boron p-type doping.

It might be ironic to be thinking about materials availability in a time of an industry downturn. However, if we think beyond the current credit constraints, the price reductions will inevitably lead to an elastic demand response. The paper by Peter Rigby and Ton Veltkamp concisely lays out the diverse considerations that must eventually be taken into account when examining both supply and demand issues affecting PV materials availability at 100+ GW scale. In essence, they argue, there should be no real concern with PV in general as a scalable energy source due to a) the diversity of PV technologies (and the associated materials they exploit), and b) the variety of strategies available to ameliorate supply/demand imbalances up and down the supply chain.

FPV6_Intro_MEM.pdf