Thin-film and Organic PV on the Rise
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April 17, 2006 |
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April 17, 2006 |
"What will drive the thin-film PV market as much as anything else is its
unique characteristics in terms of flexibility, weight and ability to integrate
into other products."
- Lawrence Gasman, Principal Analyst, NanoMarkets LC
The combination of better materials, the evolution of thin-film transistor technology, and new production methods is establishing thin-film and organic photovoltaics as a hot area for investment. Recent market forecast and analysis carried out by my firm NanoMarkets LC, indicates that revenues from PV modules that use materials such as thin-film amorphous silicon, CIS/CIGS, cadmium telluride, small molecules, polymers or organic dyes will reach $2.3 billion by 2011. Meanwhile, at least one thin-film PV firm is already attempting to raise investment valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars and all this activity may have finally refuted the old complaint against the PV industry that it does not invest enough in R&D.
Why is thin-film PV taking off now? It has been around for more than a decade
and until quite recently its main claim to fame has been as the key enabler for
solar powered calculators. Today, however, thin-film is benefiting from a
"perfect storm" of market drivers. Solar power of all kinds is attracting
considerable interest, because of high prices and dire predictions for continued
reliance on fossil fuels. And thin-film PV is getting particular attention, in
part, because it gets around the current shortage of silicon that the
traditional PV market is currently experiencing.
But even perfect storms pass. The shortage of silicon is certainly not a forever
kind of thing and it would be no surprise to see some of the current investor
enthusiasm for alternative energy begin to fade as oil prices stabilize and more
efficient ways of extracting and using fossil fuels are developed.
Nonetheless, even such short-term drivers can have long-term implications. If
the current interest in thin-film and organic PV leaves manufacturers flush with
cash, then they will be able to invest in new production technology and that
will push up all-important conversion efficiencies and reduce costs per watt.
Trends have been encouraging in this regard. CIGS, for example, now has
efficiencies that are fairly comparable to crystalline silicon PV. Most of the
thin-film PV firms we talked with for the NanoMarkets report were claiming
recent improvements in production technology that were leading to higher
throughputs and higher yields or both. This is critical because one of the
reasons that thin-film PV has not taken off in the way that it was first hoped
is that the production processes being used for this type of technology have
added costs that have all but removed the advantages that thin-film materials
were capable of offering intrinsically.
A radically new direction for creating PV is represented by printing. "Printing"
in this case, may mean either traditional printing technologies that have been
associated with graphics printing for decades or centuries. Or it may mean
ink-jet printing. Not all materials lend themselves to this approach, though. It
is particularly associated with organic materials. However, at least one firm is
pursuing the goal of a silicon ink. Printing will supposedly bring down the cost
of PV in a radical new way, ultimately resulting in orders of magnitude and
improvements in cost per watt.
Lower costs are likely to play a role in driving thin-film into the numerous
markets already served by PV -- everything from power for emergency medical
facilities to power for boats. However, when one examines the cost advantages of
thin-film PV over traditional PV and balances them against efficiency and
material stability, it is hard to conclude that marketers in this space should
stress cost alone. Instead, our research in this area suggests that what will
drive the thin-film PV market as much as anything else is its unique
characteristics in terms of flexibility, weight and ability to integrate into
other products.
This helps explain why so many of the thin-film PV firms are focused on building
products into which PV is integrated. Not only are the trinity of flexibility,
weight and integration-ease likely to be key performance factors required by the
integrated building products market, but the potential size of this market is
large in terms energy consumption, which translates into many square feet of
solar modules sold. Similar considerations also apply to the use of thin-film PV
in the military and emergency systems market. Light, flexible and easily
integrated product attributes work well here too. But the target market is much
lower than for the integrated building market. This may be offset somewhat by
the value placed on PV for these products and the willingness of customers to
pay a premium for products.
The most controversial issue is whether PV will be able to address the
burgeoning need for power in mobile electronics. As more and more features are
added to cell phones and as end users expect notebook computers to offer about
the same performance levels as desktop computers, improvements in energy density
expected from the standard lithium-ion batteries now used ubiquitously in mobile
devices are being strained. PV battery boosters and chargers therefore now look
like an attractive addressable market and could only be built from thin-film or
organic materials, not from crystalline silicon. Thin-film battery boosters and
chargers have existed for some time, but have tended to be expensive low-volume
products aimed at the emergency medical, military and similar markets. What
appears to be needed now is a very low cost product that might even be
integrated directly into cell phones, for example.
The average number of hours that a laptop will run on a battery is now actually
beginning to fall for the first time and Motorola said that time-between-charges
is the most important issue facing the cell phone industry. However, critics of
this being an attractive market for PV point to the fact that the size of the
market in terms of watts is quite small compared with the housing market. Our
study suggests to us that these skeptics may be underestimating just how urgent
the need is for mobile OEMs to solve the power problem. True this part of the PV
market will have to be addressed with a low-cost solution -- probably one that
uses either printing or organic materials or both. But the PV materials used
need not have anything like the longevity associated with (say) building
materials since the average cell phone lasts approximately 18 months.
Some firms we talked with felt quite strongly that PV for mobile power was an
illusion. Others saw it as their main business opportunity. Some firms thought
that the wide experience garnered with amorphous silicon meant that this
material would forever dominate thin-film PV. Others forecast the rise of
entirely novel material systems. However, what did not seem to be in dispute was
that thin-film PV is on the verge of a market explosion that firms in the
industry have been expecting for more than a decade.
To learn more about NanoMarkets as well as to request a summary from the
firm's recent research into Thin Film and Organic PV, please visit the link
below.
About the author...
Lawrence Gasman is the Principal Analyst at NanoMarkets, where he has conducted
demanding market research on organic and thin film electronics, printable
electronics, displays, photovoltaics, nano-enabled computer memories,
nanosensors, photonic integration, MEMS and semiconductor lasers. Mr. Gasman has
been quoted in a wide range of publications including The Wall Street Journal,
Forbes, Investor's Business Daily, EE Times, Business 2.0, Red Herring and Small
Times. He has recently completed a book on the commercialization of
nanotechnology for Artech House, which will be published in June of 2006 . Mr.
Gasman has been a speaker at numerous conferences on emerging electronics.
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