Accelerating Laboratory Thin Film Photovoltaic Innovation into Commercial Production
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Accelerating Laboratory Thin Film Photovoltaic Innovation into Commercial Production Fred H. Seymour PrimeStar Solar Inc., 14401 West 65th Way, Unit B, Arvada, CO 80004, U.S.A. ABSTRACT Alternative energy sources such as thin film photovoltaics can be accelerated by improving the rapid and successful transition from laboratory research innovation to commercial production. Most laboratory research and development is on a small scale and its production is in small volumes. It focuses on exploration, discovery, and understanding. When the successful innovation is commercialized, both the scale and the volume increase dramatically and the focus shifts to performance, reliability, yield and cost. This transformation can be accelerated by closely managing risk and by integrating the equipment design and the process development. Also, the cadmium telluride photovoltaic technology has properties that make it more amenable to rapid scale up to low cost and high volume manufacturing. INTRODUCTION Publicity about renewable energy including photovoltaics (PV) has set expectations that these energy sources are going to become significant and competitive contributors to the global energy mix. The PV manufacturing industry is maturing with expanding production capacity and decreasing prices. PV manufacturers realize that they must rapidly improve their module power rating, reliability, certification, as well as reduce their manufacturing costs in order to be competitive. For many, quickly bringing new technical innovations from the laboratory into a revenue generating product is critical to their survival. The module price is proportional to the power that it will produce over its expected useful life. This depends on the rated power for the module, the local solar conditions, and how the PV technology responds to the local solar conditions. Solar modules are generally purchased because they will yield a predictable number of kilowatt hours of power per year. A module with a higher energy conversion efficiency and a higher rated power will sell for a higher price. With higher efficiencies, the manufacturer’s profit margin is improved in three ways: 1) The module price is higher because it has a higher rated power. 2) There is a price per watt premium because the higher energy conversion efficiency density results in a lower balance of system cost per watt for the installer. 3) Assuming comparable manufacturing costs per module, the manufacturing cost per watt will be lower since these costs are distributed over more watts per module. These economic motivations make increasing device conversion efficiency the core of most PV technology improvement research. The initial research is typically on a laboratory scale of the order of 1cm2 cells, with small numbers of cells and where the focus is on exploration, discovery and understanding. Once the proof of concept for an efficiency improvement is established, then attention turns to scaling it for manufacturing. Pre-screening ideas for their manufacturability prior to proof
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