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

In recent years, a new generation of solar electric products has emerged from the lab into the global market: thin-film technologies that employ approximately 1% of the active, expensive photovoltaic material used by standard crystalline-silicon cells. Through a combination of cost advantages and new product applications, cadmium telluride (CdTe), amorphous silicon, and copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) thin-film PV have the potential to foster a paradigm shift toward distributed electricity generation at cost parity with other forms of energy. CIGS has long been seen as one of the most promising thin-film PV materials. But until recently, the photoactive compound has not had a reliable, rapid manufacturing process that could scale effectively to multi-megawatt-scale volume production and provide significant amounts of electricity at the point of use. This article describes a novel process, known as field-assisted simultaneous synthesis and transfer (FASST) printing, a manufacturing approach that enables the rapid printing of microscale CIGS films with p- and n-type nanodomains that are critical for achieving the highest efficiencies possible.

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