An international research team from leading solar PV institutions and companies has identified the most important R&D trends for what it calls the new era of multi-terawatt photovoltaics.
The members of the group were all part of 4th Terawatt Workshop, one of a series of high-level international PV workshops led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE), the United States Department of Energy’s National Laboratory of the Rockies and Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).
In their new paper, “Historical and future learning for the new era of multi-terawatt photovoltaics,” recently published in Nature Energy, the group predicts continued improvements in PV price, performance, and reliability, alongside growing attention to resource use, emissions, and recycling in future designs and manufacturing.
“Solar module efficiency may exceed 35% through tandem structures by 2050,” said Andreas Bett, director of Fraunhofer ISE, in an interview with pv magazine. He added that cell efficiency could surpass 36%, with lower cell-to-module losses than today. “By the end of the first half of this century, solar module prices may drop by a factor of two.”
Bett said both higher efficiency and lower costs will be critical to the energy transition, but he sees efficiency as the more important factor. “Higher efficiency means less material and less land are needed for PV installations, which improves sustainability and reduces overall system costs,” he said, adding that solar module lifetimes will “certainly” extend beyond 40 years.
The researchers stressed that the PV industry has consistently exceeded earlier projections for module cost, performance, and integration. Innovations in tandem architectures and manufacturing are expected for PV technologies such as crystalline silicon (c-Si), cadmium telluride (CdTe), and copper, indium, gallium and diselenide (CIGS) could and should enable new players to enter the market, creating a more globally diversified cell and module supply chain.
They also explained that the new tandem PV technologies will have to clearly define performance, ensure predictable energy output, detect early failures, and manage unknown degradation risks, with the last being a challenge also for current Si modules and critical for emerging perovskite-based technologies.
The study projects that global solar manufacturing capacity could reach about 3 TW by 2050 and highlights that sustainability-driven learning has already lowered costs and will be increasingly vital for the PV industry to secure the resources needed for future growth.
“Topics for future PV community meetings, such as the 4th Terawatt Workshop that informed this Perspective, may shift to addressing system and end-user needs,” the scientists concluded. “Investment, manufacturing and adoption today will pay globally transformative dividends tomorrow in terms of economic growth, productivity, job creation and reduced pollution and poverty.”
The research group included scientists from the Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Japanese solar glass maker AGC Inc, Finland’s LUT University, China’s Yangtze Institute for Solar Technology, UK perovskite solar specialist Oxford Photovoltaics Ltd, Chinese module maker Trina Solar, Saudi Arabia’s KAUST Solar Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, U.S. thin-film manufacturer First Solar, Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (NEDO), and Singapore-based PV manufacturer Maxeon, among others.
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