Abstract
Summary
Printing has always had a role in photovoltaics: the top electrodes for
conventional crystalline silicon PV are inevitably screened silver. However,
the opportunities for using printing technology in the PV industry has
expanded enormously in the past few years and now includes not just the
printing of electrodes, but of the core PV absorber layer itself, which is
increasingly a thin-film material and thus printable.
From the PV side of the house, firms have been driven to consider and use
printing technology in the belief that R2R printing technologies will reduce
the cost of manufacturing compared with the more usual PVD approaches to
manufacturing. In addition, printing technologies also seem well suited to the
plastic substrates and organic PV materials that are now being developed and
deployed in the PV industry. On the other hand, from the perspective of
functional printing, PV represents a growth market in an era in which many of
the other market sectors that were supposed to drive printed electronics have
gone dry. Printed PV is, however, a business with its own unique issues;
printing PV tends to reduce conversion, efficiencies.
In this report, NanoMarkets identifies and quantifies the markets and
opportunities for printed PV. It discusses both the printing of electrodes and
the absorber layer for silicon, CdTe, CIGS, organic (OPV) and dye sensitive
cell (DSC) PV. This report identifies the types of printing being developed
for each of the TFPV materials and discusses the impact this will have for
materials and equipment suppliers. Where appropriate, short profiles of key
firms are provided. Finally, eight-year forecasts are provided for each of the
printed PV technologies.
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