Prospects for Nanomaterials in Thin-Film and Organic Photovoltaic Transparent Conductors

The diversity of PV technologies indicates plenty of opportunities for TC suppliers to find new business in PV, but it also means that PV will be among the first market segments to jump on a new TC once one has demonstrated higher transparency and conductivity performance.

In the long-run, we believe that the desire to keep pushing production costs lower without sacrificing performance will favor increasing market share for the emerging, solution-processable TCs, from "low-end" conductive polymer-based TCs to high-performance nanosilver or carbon nanomaterial-based TCs.

CIGS’ Achilles Heel: Lifetimes and Encapsulation

Lifetime and encapsulation are two factors that have slowed adoption of CIGS. These issues are now largely closed from a technology perspective, but remain open from a cost perspective

Is CIGS Ready for High Volume Manufacturing?

It is beginning to look like CIGS really is ready for high volume manufacturing.  Global Solar now has a 40 MW capacity plant operating in Tucson Arizona and a 35 MW capacity plant coming on line in Berlin Germany.  The Berlin plant has moved from one to two shifts per day and is planning to move to three shifts soon.  The flexible BIPV roofing modules made by Global Solar are both International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Underwriters Laboratories (UL) certified.  Global Solar has recently announced multi-year, multi-megawatt agreements with ENERGYKA, ISCOM SPA, BA energy in Europe and Beachside Solar, Pfister Energy and Inovateus Solar in the US.

CIGS in a World of Reduced Subsidies and Economic Uncertainty

The value proposition of thin-film PV is clear.  If it can be executed at a price point that is competitive with coal and natural gas, it provides a competitive more environmentally friendly though variable source of electricity. While the current PV landscape is dominated by an oversupply of crystalline PV cells (crystalline PV module prices have fallen by 50% over the past eighteen months), the longer-term outlook for thin-film PV, and CIGS in particular, provides a compelling argument for this technology to be a significant factor in the PV landscape.

What Does the Decline of Plasma Displays and Rise of Flexible Displays and OLEDs Mean for Silver?

The market for silver inks and pastes in one important sector – plasma display panels (PDPs) – is almost certainly in a period of slow and steady decline.  We do not anticipate that this market will completely disappear, but it is facing serious challenges. The latest LCDs rival the performance of PDPs in almost every characteristic important to the consumer, and this means that PDPs are now competing primarily on price.

Will the Nanosilver Ink Revolution Ever Happen?

Will nanosilver ever become a major factor in the printed circuitry market? It has long been touted as having a big future in (currently nonexistent) novel “printed electronics” applications, but this has yet to be proven. The market pull for printed electronics has just never materialized in a meaningful way. Nanosilver ink makers have had a hard time of it as they have chased after new markets that do not really exist yet.

Printable nanosilver makers claim other seemingly compelling advantages over conventional silver inks and pastes, too. These include lower temperature processing and less usage precious silver. But nanosilver-based inks and pastes have been around for nearly a decade now, and they have yet to take off in the conventional printed silver markets.  What is behind the lack of progress?

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.

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.

What is holding back flexible OLED displays?

It has long been the dram of the OLED industry to provide high quality, low cost flexible panels manufactured using R2R processes on plastic substrates.  What has held back their commercialization?  Certainly, there are several factors that have kept flexible OLEDs from becoming anything other than a dream, from the dearth of suitable substrates to the (near) nonexistence of flexible backplanes.  But lack of adequate encapsulation technologies is also a key factor, because the viability of flexible OLEDs built on inexpensive porous plastics relies on the ability to encapsulate them with adequate environmental barriers.

Flexible Glass

What if you could eliminate the need (at least mostly) for flexible dyad encapsulation layers by using ultrathin, flexible glass as the substrate? The idea here is that the benefits of glass—higher conversion efficiency, heat tolerance, pinhole-free surfaces, and better barrier properties—might be preserved as the glass is made thin enough to be reasonably flexible.

Opportunities for Encapsulation in OLED Lighting

The relatively early-stage nature of this market, combined with the knowledge that high volume—and preferably roll-to-roll (R2R)—manufacturing will be necessary to compete in the long-term, has meant that OLED panel manufacturers have been quite willing to explore development of non-glass encapsulation technologies.  For this reason, OLED encapsulation suppliers can distinguish themselves by developing proprietary solutions that will give them long-term competitive advantages.

alt-TCOs Are Ready for Prime Time

BIPV makers, especially in the emerging DSC technologies are investing in FTO technology.  Smart windows and touch screen still using ITO? This could be a danger as alt-TCOs already match the anode characteristics needed for these products, and with the case of touch screen, Asian companies are already adapting these products. Stick with ITO and be prepared for price fluctuations and instability of supply, or champion the alt-TCO technology and reap the rewards. These concerns are discussed in our new report Emerging Markets for Non-ITO Transparent Conductive Oxides, available now from NanoMarkets.

Demand for OLEDs Escalates

For the better part of a decade, OLED materials have represented little more than a niche opportunity for specialty chemical companies and a few start-ups.  This was primarily because the market for OLEDs was largely confined to MP3 payers and cell-phone sub-displays and was plagued with cost challenges and low margins. While materials firms were happy to participate in this market, their enthusiasm remained curbed by the fact that despite constant predictions of the "Year of the OLED," these predictions always turned out to be false hopes.  Pessimism about the sector was also encouraged by the fact that a number of display firms quit making OLED displays altogether having been discouraged especially with the difficulties in making AM OLED displays.

New Strategies Needed for the OLED Materials Business Gets Tougher, But New Opportunities Abound

We think that the OLED materials business is likely to get tougher in important ways.  It is one thing supplying materials to an industry whose end product is mostly a type of display that shows a clock or date on one side of a cell phone.  It is quite another supplying materials to an industry whose goal is to produce large displays for videophiles and attractive lighting that offers high-efficiency and improved total cost of ownership.  AM OLED displays are largely being marketed in the consumer electronics space on image quality and vibrancy of color.  This raises the question as to how materials makers can improve their products to help their customers sell more OLED cell phones and TVs.  In the OLED lighting space, the focus is on efficiency and reducing total cost of ownership and, here again, it seems that OLED materials suppliers can develop proprietary solutions that will give them long-term competitive advantages.