The Future of Thin-Film and Organic Photovoltaics Manufacturing, Nanomarkets Report

The rapid and recent commercialization of thin-film and organic PV has automatically put the spotlight on manufacturing issues. There are many different approaches being used today from traditional sputtering to avant-garde functional printing approaches. In some cases the old and the new are combined in the same fabrication plant. Some solar panel firms are going with a turnkey plant supplied by a large equipment manufacturer. Others are building their own plants from scratch.

With so much diversity and change in this field, NanoMarkets believes that the time is right for this new report which surveys the manufacturing of thin-film PV (TFPV) and organic PV (OPV.) One goal of this report is to analyze the underlying performance of the plants built to date and to both understand where the challenges are and where the solutions to these challenges may be coming from. Another goal is to forecast the aggregate capacity of TFPV and OPV plants that are currently being built throughout the world or likely to be built in the near future. A third is to project the expenditures of TFPV firms on production equipment over an eight year period.

One question that this report deals with specifically is the thorny question as to how important the future role of printing will be to the PV sector and which equipment firms are having success selling into this sector. We also discuss such matters as the tradeoffs between low manufacturing costs and cell efficiencies, the importance of economies of scale, integration of manufacturing facilities, approaches to manufacturing new cell types, etc.

This report analyzes the state of the art in fabrication of both the manufacture of the photoactive layers themselves and the metallization process. We analyze the available data on how successful each approach to the manufacture of thin-film and organic PV is currently being and where the firms active in this space are looking for improvements and breakthroughs. In addition to the analysis itself, this report includes profiles of the manufacturing operations of 15 firms involved in producing solar products in the TFPV and OPV sector