Analyst says PV Materials Seeing 27% Growth In 2010

Advanced chemicals and materials used to make PV solar cells and modules continue to establish a foothold, poised to grow to about $14B by 2015, according to an industry analyst.

The market for PV chemicals and materials declined slightly to around $2.44B in 2009, and should grow 27% to $3.1B in 2010, and step along to a $14B tally within the next six years, forecasts Linx Consulting. Driving this growth will be end-market demand for solar power, expected to push from 5.8GW to 38GW during the same timeframe.

The group’s new projections are a little more conservative than the group’s outlook a year ago, especially in the final years of the outlook — about $1B difference by the end of the forecast period. In April 2009 the company projected a decline to $2.3B in chemicals and materials used to make PV solar cells and modules, but pegged the market would grow to $15B by 2015.

The full report, Chemicals & Materials for Photovoltaic Cells and Modules 2010, offers detailed perspectives into chemicals needs for individual cell and module types for crystalline silicon (c-Si), amorphous silicon (a-Si), tandem-junction, CdTe, and CIGS/CIS cells and modules, as well as the emergence and impact of critical technologies around texturization and cleaning, metallization, selective emitters, backsheets, frontsheets, and encapsulants. It also includes perspectives on the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) as a function of module performance, including geographic considerations such as local incentives and irradiance.

Total PV materials market. (Source: Linx-AEI Consulting)

www.electroiq.com

Large-Scale Solar Power Farms Arise

When it comes to solar these days, it’s go big or go home.

Utilities are being pushed to use more renewable energy, heating up the business of large-scale solar power.

There are competing designs for utility-scale solar farms. By concentrating light to make steam, some designs use heat to generate electricity. In parallel, other companies concentrate light onto photovoltaic cells to generate electricity.

The latter, known as concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) systems, may make more sense in a broader set of geographies, compared with concentrating solar thermal. Both forms of concentrating solar power are meant to improve on sun-tracking flat panels.

Which technological approach will win out isn’t clear yet, but the demand for centralized solar-power generation systems is there.

Prometheus Institute forecasts that 50 gigawatts of electricity could be generated this way by 2020. Currently, there 430 megawatts worth of concentrating solar power systems installed around the world, according to Emerging Energy Research.

California and Spain are the biggest markets for these concentrating solar power systems. If renewable portfolio standards get passed in more states, we could see a much greater diversity of technologies beyond the solar trough and solar tower.

The Prometheus Institute, in a report published by Greentech Media, forecasts that concentrating photovoltaic technologies will be used in midsize to large power plants that range from about 1 megawatt of production to about 100 megawatts.

Concentrating solar thermal systems, meanwhile, will dominate very large centralized power generation.

New Technology May Eliminate Large Panels

Researchers at Georgia Tech. University claim to have found a way to convert sunlight to electricity, which might no longer mean large panels of photovoltaic cells would be needed atop flat surfaces like roofs.

Fiber-optic Cable

Using zinc oxide nanostructures grown on optical fibers and coated with dye-sensitized solar cell materials, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new type of three-dimensional photovoltaic system. The approach could allow photovoltaic systems to be hidden from view and located away from traditional locations such as rooftops.

Using this technology, they can make photovoltaic generators that are foldable, concealed and mobile. Optical fiber could conduct sunlight into a building’s walls where the nanostructures would convert it to electricity. This is claimed to be truly a three dimensional solar cell.

Details of the research were published in the early view of the journal Angewandte Chemie International on October 22. The work was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the KAUST Global Research Partnership and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Dye-sensitized solar cells use a photochemical system to generate electricity. They are inexpensive to manufacture, flexible and mechanically robust, but their tradeoff for lower cost is conversion efficiency lower than that of silicon-based cells. But using nanostructure arrays to increase the surface area available to convert light could help reduce the efficiency disadvantage, while giving architects and designers new options for incorporating PV into buildings, vehicles and even military equipment.

Fabrication of the new Georgia Tech photovoltaic system begins with optical fiber of the type used by the telecommunications industry to transport data. First, the researchers remove the cladding layer, then apply a conductive coating to the surface of the fiber before seeding the surface with zinc oxide. Next, they use established solution-based techniques to grow aligned zinc oxide nanowires around the fiber much like the bristles of a bottle brush. The nanowires are then coated with the dye-sensitized materials that convert light to electricity.

Sunlight entering the optical fiber passes into the nanowires, where it interacts with the dye molecules to produce electrical current. A liquid electrolyte between the nanowires collects the electrical charges. The result is a hybrid nanowire/optical fiber system that can be up to six times as efficient as planar zinc oxide cells with the same surface area.

In each reflection within the fiber, the light has the opportunity to interact with the nanostructures that are coated with the dye molecules. There are multiple light reflections within the fiber, and multiple reflections within the nanostructures. These interactions increase the likelihood that the light will interact with the dye molecules, and that increases the efficiency.

The Georgia Tech. research team has reached an efficiency of 3.3 percent and hope to reach 7 to 8 percent after surface modification. While lower than silicon solar cells, this efficiency would be useful for practical energy harvesting.

By providing a larger area for gathering light, the technique would maximize the amount of energy produced from strong sunlight, as well as generate respectable power levels even in weak light. The amount of light entering the optical fiber could be increased by using lenses to focus the incoming light, and the fiber-based solar cell has a very high saturation intensity.

They believe this new structure will offer architects and product designers an alternative photovoltaic format for incorporating into other applications.

This could potentially provide some new options for photovoltaic systems. The aesthetic issues of photovoltaic arrays on building could be eliminated. This could also potentially allow photovoltaic systems to provide energy to parked vehicles, and charge mobile military equipment where traditional arrays aren’t practical or you wouldn’t want to use them.

The research team has produced generators on optical fiber up to 20 centimeters in length. It is said to be “The longer the better,” because longer the light can travel along the fiber, the more bounces it will make and more it will be absorbed.

Traditional quartz optical fiber has been used so far, but they would like to use less expensive polymer fiber to reduce the cost. They are also considering other improvements, such as a better method for collecting the charges and a titanium oxide surface coating that could further boost efficiency.

Though it could be used for large photovoltaic systems, they don’t expect their solar cells to replace silicon devices any time soon. But he does believe they will broaden the potential applications for photovoltaic energy.

www.gatech.edu