Is Time Running Out For OPV?

The OPV market continues to struggle to get off the ground. The last year has produced a few bright spots—some new investments, some modest performance enhancements, additional demonstration and/or niche product launches, etc.—but the industry still needs a big breakthrough, or at least a clear path toward a larger-area or larger-scale application that can take OPV to the next level commercially.  Unfortunately, the value propositions that have been claimed for OPV in the past continue to get harder and harder to make: OPV’s costs are still very high, flexible encapsulation is still a problem, and a big market pull for portable, small-scale charging has not materialized.  Meanwhile, development and commercialization of OPV’s closest “third generation” competitor, DSC PV, has outpaced that of OPV, and now it looks as though time for OPV may be running out.

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.

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.

How OPV Can Survive

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.

Medical Diagnostics: An Opportunity for Printed Electronics

Over the past two decades, more accurate, convenient and earlier diagnoses have become a key strategy to reduce medical costs. This trend toward improved diagnostic technology will only grow in importance in the future as the first Baby Boomers turn seventy (in 2011) and as millions of people in less-developed nations begin to utilize more Western healthcare technology as their countries grow richer. In addition, healthcare experts have come to believe that diagnoses are most effectively delivered if they are made as close to the patient as possible. A quick read of a patient's condition at his or her bedside is preferred over a test sent to a lab that may take critical hours or days to interpret.

All this implies that the market for point-of-care and home diagnostic products will expand over the next few years. In our recently published report on printed and large-area sensors, NanoMarkets examined how low-cost printing technologies can help diagnostics respond to the trends outlined above. The path toward this goal of printed sensors has already been forged in the area of self-testing for diabetics, where printed test strips have helped bring accurate digital diagnostics to the tens of millions of diabetics throughout the world.