Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

• Popular Technical Papers

  • Overview of automation in the photovoltaic industry
  • Understanding moisture ingress and packaging requirements for photovoltaic modules
  • Evaluation of encapsulant materials for PV applications
  • Inline processing of crystalline silicon solar cells: the holy grail for large-scale manufacturing?
  • PV sector outlook: an analyst’s perspective

• Featured Technical Papers

  • Transparent conducting oxide deposition techniques for thin-film photovoltaics
  • Comprehensive and advanced quality assurance measures for optimal yields from PV power plants
  • Surface passivation of silicon solar cells using industrially relevant Al2O3 deposition techniques
  • Influence of a-Si:H deposition temperature on thermal stability of a-Si:H/SiNx:H stacks
  • Integrated loops: a prerequisite for sustainable and environmentally-friendly polysilicon production

As recently as a couple of years ago, solar panels based on thin-film manufacturing technology were being promoted as the low-cost alternative to crystalline silicon. Not only was it cheaper, but thin film also had a convincing roadmap which guaranteed this cost advantage for the foreseeable future. That was 2008, when persistently high polysilicon prices seemed inevitable as demand for solar electricity boomed. We now know that assumption to be false, and although we all knew polysilicon prices would fall eventually, no one predicted the speed and magnitude with which they crashed: in the space of several months, prices reached the point where any advantage associated with the lower materials costs of thin-film manufacturing were completely blown away.

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