How OPV Can Survive

Published: May 21, 2010    Category: Renewable Energy

Organic photovoltaics (OPV) is the cheapest way to make PV electricity, right?  The printing presses can run 24x7 to inundate us with cheap solar power that can be put into anything from window blinds to backpacks to cell phone cases, right?  These are supposed to be the things that will deliver OPV to become the highest-volume PV technology in the world. But this turns out to have been the wrong approach.  Maybe OPV can be cheaper than cadmium telluride PV (CdTe) or maybe not.  But for sure, with OPV’s low efficiency and limited lifetime it would need to be a whole lot cheaper than CdTe to compete in the same markets.  The supply-limited market of 2007-early 2008 is long gone and PV products need to compete on their merits and usefulness.

Even the focus on “flexible” applications like the backpacks and window blinds and rooftop coverings doesn’t seem likely to help OPV much; similar products are also emerging using thin-film silicon or CIGS technology and have the advantages of higher efficiency, longer life, and higher manufacturing volumes.OPV instead needs to focus on the niches where other PV technologies can’t or won’t compete.  By using plastic for the active layers and inherently flexible materials for electrodes (goodbye, ITO) OPV can be more flexible than CIGS and TF Si, perhaps coated on or even woven into fabrics, for instance, instead of relying on fairly stiff modules laminated on.  And the other PV technologies probably won’t chase too hard after low-cost, low-margin indoor applications like powering RFID and electronic shelf labels, focusing instead on the higher-performance, higher-margin applications.  OPV has other advantages too, like (limited) transparency of the cells and relatively low power drop in low light; finding niches to capitalize on these advantages will also provide some of the best growth opportunities.

Of course, these niches will not produce the high volumes that were once hoped for OPV.  And they will be limited; just how many solar-powered jumpsuits will people buy anyway?  But this is where OPV’s opportunities lie, in market segments where the competition from other PV technologies—way ahead in conversion efficiency and close in cost—is not so intense.

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