Changes in PV and What It Means for Transparent Conductors

Published: January 26, 2012    Category: Advanced Materials Renewable Energy

NanoMarkets anticipates significant challenges to the status quo in the photovoltaics (PV) market in the coming decade. The PV sector as a whole is entering a period of flat or moderate growth in the next couple of years, and the industry remains highly cost sensitive. Meanwhile, the ongoing shift in market share toward thin-film PV (TFPV) is changing the accepted landscape of available PV technologies. This movement, in turn, is causing a shift in demand for transparent conductors (TCs) in PV applications from market-dominant crystalline silicon (c-Si) PV that uses little or no TCs to TFPV that, in most cases, requires the use of high performance TC electrodes.

Changes in the TFPV Market that Affect TCs

The PV market has, for the past several years, been a boon to the materials industry.  Partly thanks to government subsidies, the solar industry has grown dramatically, including a significant growth spurt in 2010. NanoMarkets believes, however, that the boom days are over for the PV sector, and the outlook for the next decade is much different from that of the last.  First, the success of the PV industry is closely tied to the construction industry, which is still struggling in several important markets, such as Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, Spain, and the U.K.  Second, we think that, in most countries, many of the subsidies and tax incentives that have supported the PV industry for a number of years are going to be reduced significantly.  Recall that when the Spanish government took this step a few years ago, the PV market in Spain declined by 75 percent. 

This slow growth affects the c-Si market the most, but the TFPV market is not immune.  And the penetration of TFPV will happen gradually, rather than sharply, and we are not certain it will happen rapidly enough to overcome sluggish overall growth prospects. The end result of this analysis is that the TC industry can no longer rely on the TFPV industry to provide new business based on rapid growth. Complicating the picture, too, is the fact that growth will occur only as long as the TFPV industry is able to keep up with the continuing cost reductions in the c-Si sector, and as long as the flood of low-cost Chinese silicon modules cause minimal disruption to the TFPV business models.

The expected trajectories of the different PV sub-sectors and their impact on the TC business are quite different:

• The success of cadmium-telluride (CdTe) PV, driven by a single firm, First Solar, has created a de facto entrenchment of a single TC type, namely fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) in this PV technology. Until now, this situation has meant that there were few opportunities for other materials (or other suppliers) to gain entry.  However, with the recent entry of GE into the fray, things may be changing in CdTe PV.  And since First Solar’s success has proven that CdTe PV can effectively compete with c-Si PV, we expect that other panel makers may also explore implementation of CdTe PV. This new scenario could present opportunities for TC suppliers to gain entry by offering products that provide an additional efficiency, cost or other market-differentiating advantage beyond that which FTO can offer.

• The situation has not been so great at firms producing copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide (CIGS) PV. The shuttering of Solyndra in 2011 and the exiting of Veeco in 2010 caused some concern that CIGS was headed for failure, but we think instead that the struggling industry needed the consolidation.  Those that remain may be in a better position now to learn from the mistakes of the failed firms, and innovative firms will look for new ways to reduce costs and improve performance, both of which are very much tied to the choice of TC.

• Thin-film silicon (TF Si) is still around, and still accounts for the biggest chunk of the TFPV market.  We expect this sector to remain large throughout the period covered by this report, but we also anticipate that its market share will continue to shrink as other more cost-effective PV technologies take hold. In this market, we think that cost cutting, rather than innovation, will rule the day, which means that low-cost alternatives that require minimal changes to implement—i.e. principally transparent conductive oxides (TCOs)—will see opportunities to expand or gain entry.

• Meanwhile, organic PV (OPV) and dye-sensitized cell (DSC) PV have struggled to take off as quickly as expected, and the outlook for these sectors, although promising, remains somewhat uncertain. OPV and DSC have thus far mostly used ITO TCs based on legacy rather than strategy, while these technologies have developed. However, OPV and DSC are now entering a do-or-die commercialization period during which the realities of scale-up are front and center, and where the need to keep costs down and performance high will favor evaluation of many different TCs, including those like nanosilver and conductive polymers that promise low-cost, sputter-free processing.

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