Solar ♦ news digest
generates large amounts of power with industry- leading efficiency and low environmental impact – in areas such as Southern California with abundant sunshine.
“These new contracts with SDG&E reinforce Soitec’s decision to build its new manufacturing site in the San Diego area, and confirms the importance of the U.S. market for our company,” said André- Jacques Auberton-Hervé, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Soitec. “We are very pleased to have a direct role in bringing ‘home grown’ solar energy to the people of San Diego.”
Soitec’s new manufacturing facility will have an annual production capacity of 200 MW and will supply all of SDG&E’s projects with Soitec’s exclusive Concentrix CPV technology, which produces power at a much higher efficiency relative to standard solar panels. At full capacity, Soitec’s San Diego operations facility will generate up to 450 direct jobs and more than 1,000 indirect jobs. The factory location is expected to be announced this summer, with completion within 18 months of construction start.
The power contracts require approval from the California Public Utilities Commission.
www.sdge.com www.soitec.com
Record efficiency of 18.7% for flexible CIGS solar cells on plastics
Scientists at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, have further boosted the energy conversion efficiency of flexible solar cells made of copper indium gallium (di) selenide (also known as CIGS) to a new world record of 18.7% – a significant improvement over the previous record of 17.6% achieved by the same team in June 2010. The measurements have been independently certified by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg, Germany.
Caption: Flexible thin film CIGS solar cell on polymer substrate developed at Empa (Copyright: Empa)
It’s all about the money. To make solar electricity affordable on a large scale, scientists and engineers worldwide have long been trying to develop a low-cost solar cell, which is both highly efficient and easy to manufacture with high throughput. Now a team at Empa’s Laboratory for Thin Film and Photovoltaics, led by Ayodhya N. Tiwari, has made a major step forward. “The new record value for flexible CIGS solar cells of 18.7% nearly closes the “efficiency gap” to solar cells based on polycrystalline silicon (Si) wafers or CIGS thin film cells on glass”, says Tiwari. He is convinced that “flexible and lightweight CIGS solar cells with efficiencies comparable to the “best-in-class” will have excellent potential to bring about a paradigm shift and to enable low-cost solar electricity in the near future.”
One major advantage of flexible high-performance CIGS solar cells is the potential to lower manufacturing costs through roll-to-roll processing while at the same time offering a much higher efficiency than the ones currently on the market. What’s more, such lightweight and flexible solar modules offer additional cost benefits in terms of transportation, installation, structural frames for the modules etc., i.e. they significantly reduce the so- called “balance of system” costs. Taken together, the new CIGS polymer cells exhibit numerous advantages for applications such as facades, solar farms and portable electronics. With high- performance devices now within reach, the new results suggest that monolithically-interconnected flexible CIGS solar modules with efficiencies above 16% should be achievable with the recently developed processes and concepts.
At the forefront of efficiency improvements
In recent years, thin film photovoltaic technology based on glass substrates has gained sufficient
June 2011
www.compoundsemiconductor.net 165
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