Printing electricity from sun and heat - the new photovoltaics

By Dr. Peter Harrop
IDTechEx

Solar cells are needed on everything from clothing to packaging, toys, spaceships, consumer goods, medical testers, skin patches and tools. Mostly, they must be thin and flexible, lightweight, environmental and low in cost - even disposable in many cases. Optical transparency would prevent them defacing items and higher efficiency and working from heat as well as light are sought. Working well in real world conditions of reflected or low level light would help. In other words, a multi-faceted $100 billion market is emerging that will consist of very different requirements but most of them can never be met by today’s opaque, expensive, crystalline or amorphous silicon in its heavy, thick glass encapsulation and limited module area. A much better route is printing, at least to the extent of reel to reel production on low cost substrates and increasingly by ink jet like processes and other techniques of the traditional printing industry which is already developing printed transistors, batteries and other devices that will sometimes be printed on this “printed” photovoltaic film.