Surveying the OPV landscape today, we still see a sector striving to make early lab-scale results translate into real-world products. The goalposts clearly have pushed back yet again. However, there are some encouraging signs that the technology really is moving closer to commercial readiness — and perhaps even knocking on the doorstep, if one believes the most optimistic views — enough to put some early market traction within reach.

The solar panel industry now seems back on track following the boom-and-bust period. It's still a sector dominated by crystalline silicon, but the current upswing means that the search is on once more for materials platforms that improve the conversion efficiency of solar panels, and efforts have been rebooted to hone and ultimately commercialize these next-generation materials.

Some of them are close at hand, such as novel approaches to doping silicon panels. Meanwhile, the thin-film PV sector continues to seek success against entrenched c-Si; this could come from improvements to CdTe and CIGS, while other thin-film materials are beginning to receive serious commercial attention. The solar industry also is beginning to think out of the box with a slew of entirely new nanomaterials such as quantum dots, nanowires, nanotubes and graphene.

Here's a rundown of what we see emerging in next-gen solar PV materials

The multimillion-dollar question about BIPV is this: what will convince customers — architects, builders, and homeowners, even construction materials suppliers and financing entities — to justify the extra expense in a BIPV application? Companies and organizations continue to improve and innovate around the technologies involve with building-integrated photovoltaics (PV), from new cell designs and technologies such as PERC, metal wrap-through, and “smart wire” structures, to new and improved materials from thin-film CIGS to dye-sensitized and organic PV, and the latest solar PV wonder-material perovskite. Standardization will help reduce the complexity (and thus costs) of BIPV installations; this already has made some headway in the U.K. for products such as roof tiles and shingles. These are needed progress in performance and cost reductions, but they're not enough.

Any PV technology that hopes to compete with c-Si in today’s solar energy world must solve several problems: raise conversion efficiencies to around those of silicon-based cells (at least 20 percent), lower costs below that of c-Si (roughly $0.40-$0.50/Watt), or find specific niche markets where an alternative PV technology's features and capabilities are an acceptable tradeoff for lower cost/performance, such as flexibility.

In the past few months, the thin-film CIGS sector has made impressive progress in solving part of that equation. It's eclipsed the top efficiency mark of polysilicon-based cells (20.4 percent), and hasn't looked back:

Generally speaking, NanoMarkets sees DSC-enabled BIPV applications likely inching closer to mass production levels toward the end of the decade, with the first commercial production of DSC modules coming within a five-year window from leading manufacturers such as Dyseol and 3GSolar. BIPV glass, the current hot-spot for DSC application, has channeled many investments and pilot efforts, particularly in Europe but with backing from Asian partners. Our latest analysis suggests the market for DSC-enabled BIPV glass will surge from just $1.3 million to more than $256 million in 2021.

Beyond BIPV, NanoMarkets recognizes other end market opportunities for DSC that could bear fruit with higher-efficiency technology that works in low/ambient light conditions. However, we feel these are still several years further out from being viable revenue streams, and well short of the scale promised by BIPV:

In order to move beyond a niche product, building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) will need to demonstrate both improved efficiency and lower cost. NanoMarkets believes that BIPV should be able to benefit from the growth that we expect to see in the PV market as a whole, but the degree to which it succeeds will likely depend on advances in technology and choice of PV materials. This may require switching to improved or completely different materials than what is commonly used today. Our latest report on BIPV glass, “BIPV Glass Markets– 2014 and Beyond,” describes PV technologies being used for this application today and analyzes which materials are likely to gain market share in the future.

While silicon PV is currently king of the PV landscape, CIGS is a PV technology that has the potential to make significant inroads in the next several years.  While progress has been slow due to the complexity of co-depositing four elements to generate the material and the need for encapsulation of the moisture-sensitive product, the high efficiency of CIGS (near that of single crystal PV), coupled with the requirement for only small amounts of the raw materials, provides one of the few paths to beating current Si-based PV in terms of cost.  

The turnaround in the PV (photovoltaic) sector has been visible since the second half of 2013. And while 2013 was not a great year the solar industry, including BIPV (Building-Integrated Photovoltaics) in general and BIPV glass in particular is beginning to pick up.  While many firms offering BIPV glass have gone under, the ones that emerged from the solar bust are still faced with the same problem; how to get their products into the mainstream construction market and not just prestige buildings.

Smart coatings on glass and other substrates have the potential to create added value in a huge range of applications, but this can only be realized if they can provide sufficient performance enhancement at the right price. In the energy industry, the key driver is the desire to improve energy efficiency, and this is especially true in the renewable energy sector. We expect to see increased demand for coatings for solar panels and wind turbines as photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy become more prevalent and improved efficiency and low maintenance costs become increasingly important.