Researchers analyzed the potential of solar photovoltaic technology, which has been rapidly spreading across the world.
Installation of this technology has sustained an average growth of 43 percent per year since the year 2000 across the globe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reported.
The researchers said solar photovoltaic technology is "one of the few renewable, low-carbon resources with both the scalability and the technological maturity to meet ever-growing global demand for electricity."
The team proposed a system for evaluating competing approaches to improving the performance of solar cells. The report divided the technology into three broad classes: wafer-based cells, which include crystalline silicon; commercial thin-film cells such as cadmium tellurid; and emerging thin-film technologies like perovskites and quantum dots.
"We'd like to build on the conventional framework," said Joel Jean, a doctoral student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "We're seeking a more consistent way to think about the wide range of current photovoltaic technologies and to evaluate them for potential applications. In this study, we chose to evaluate all relevant technologies based on their material complexity."
The simplest material included in the analysis is traditional silicon. This material is highly efficient and does not come with scarcity constraints, but also has significant limitations. Traditional silicon is not particularly efficient at absorbing light, and is extremely heavy and dense. Perovskites, organics, and colloidal quantum dots are highly complex, but are much easier to process.
Silicon can be difficult and expensive to manufacture, but complex nanomaterials can be easily deposited onto flexible substrates and could be transparent to visible light. This could lead to new possibilities in the solar technology field, such as integration into windows. Despite these benefits, the researchers note the material's conversion efficiency and long-term stability is low. Some thin-film technologies such as cadmium telluride and copper indium gallium diselenide also require rare material, which could make their widespread use difficult.
"The road to broad acceptance of these new technologies in conventional solar markets is inevitably long, although the unique qualities of these evolving solar technologies - lightweight, paper-thin, transparent - could open entirely new markets, accelerating their adoption," the researchers wrote.
The researchers identified three themes for future research and development: increasing the power-conversion efficiency of these technologies; reducing the amount of material needed per cell; and lowering the cost and complexity of manufacturing.
"We've looked at a number of key metrics for different applications," Jean said. "We don't want to rule out any of the technologies."
The analysis was published in a recent edition of the journal Energy & Environmental Science.
