November 2011

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OLED Lighting Material Trends

While OLED lighting is still in the early stages of commercialization with small-quantity production on pilot lines. But panel shipments for OLED lighting applications are expected to really ramp up starting around the 2014 – 2015 timeframe.  Observers of the OLED lighting industry, including NanoMarkets, have been projecting growth for a while now, but some recent developments are making those projections look more certain than ever:

Stable Niche Electronics Markets for Molybdenum Remain

The list of things that could go wrong in the emerging markets for molybdenum is sobering and becomes more so when one adds them to the list of products such as vacuum tubes and other products that used to use a lot of molybdenum but are no longer viable markets.  There are, however, a number of markets for molybdenum that fall within the general area of electronics that are stable and where modest growth can be expected.

Molybdenum as a Green Electronics Material?  Plenty of Work Left Still to Do

The sanguine view of the future of molybdenum as a green electronics material is attractive, not just as an underpinning for a serious marketing plan for molybdenum, but also as part of an image or business development plan for this metal.  However, it is important to consider the fact that there are many uncertainties in the assertions made above that produce considerable business risks for molybdenum suppliers of various kinds:

Molybdenum as a Basis for Green Electronics:  PV, Lighting and Smart Grids

One area where we see an important niche market evolving for molybdenum is in the solar panel market.  Molybdenum is already the material of choice for the back electrodes in CIGS solar panels and we see this use spreading to the CdTe-based photovoltaics sector if this sector begins to experiment with new cell architectures.  There are several reasons why molybdenum has been chosen in this sector; one is its strong ability to adhere to substrates and active layers.

October 2011

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Is Flexible BIPV a Market Opportunity for Flexible Glass?

The one area of the PV industry where suppliers and (hopefully) customers seem to care about flexibility is BIPV.  Flexible BIPV occupies just a very small share of the overall PV market at the present time, but appears to offer value propositions—and opportunities—that derive from its light weight, ease of installation, and conformability with building fabrics.

Also, as  with other BIPV products where there is a high level of integration between the PV functionality and the building product functionality, flexible PV provides more controlled aesthetics and the ability to allocate costs between categories of PV power production and architectural materials with considerable discretion.  This latter point is especially important, because, by spreading costs in this way, BIPV could exhibit much better economics than regular PV.  In the current business climate for the PV industry in which subsidies for PV are being challenged, this could be valuable.

Flexible Glass and Solar Panels

Standard glass TFPV substrates are produced by a variety of companies including Corning, Schott, and Saint-Gobain. But because this standard glass can't be used for flexible PV, the flexible substrate choices involve some tradeoffs.  If glass could be adapted to be suitable for flexible applications—that is, made flexible—it could in some senses provide the "best of both worlds" and become a viable choice in this space.  This is a positive for the future of flexible glass.

Flexible Glass in the Display Industry

As we discuss in some detail in our report on flexible glass, intrinsically flexible displays would seem like a potentially very strong market for flexible glass which seems to offer precisely what is needed for both encapsulation and substrates in this sector.  However, the flexible display market has been so disappointing for so many years that we are reluctant to project a very optimistic forecast for this sector any time soon.  Nonetheless, it cannot be ignored entirely, especially since Samsung says that it is getting into this business.  In addition, as we discuss earlier in this report, there seems to be some good reasons why rollable displays might actually take off in the marketplace eventually.  Within the instrinsically flexible display sector, we need to consider OLED displays and e-paper displays separately.

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