NanoMarkets, a leading
industry analyst firm based here, today announced its next report on thin-film
and organic photovoltaics markets. The report titled, "The Future of Thin-Film
and Organic Photovoltaics Manufacturing" will be available the week of
September 8th. Additional details about the report including a preview are available
on the firm's website.
About the Report:
The rapid and recent commercialization of thin-film and organic PV has
automatically put the spotlight on manufacturing issues. There are many
different approaches being used today from traditional sputtering to
avant-garde functional printing approaches. In some cases the old and the
new are combined in the same fabrication plant. Some solar panel firms are
going with a turnkey plant supplied by a large equipment manufacturer.
Others are building their own plants from scratch.
With so much diversity and change in this field, NanoMarkets believes
that the time is right for this new report which surveys the manufacturing
of thin-film PV (TFPV) and organic PV (OPV.) One goal of this report is to
analyze the underlying performance of the plants built to date and to both
understand where the challenges are and where the solutions to these
challenges may be coming from. Another goal is to forecast the aggregate
capacity of TFPV and OPV plants that are currently being built throughout
the world or likely to be built in the near future. A third is to project
the expenditures of TFPV firms on production equipment over an eight year
period.
One question that this report deals with specifically is the thorny
question as to how important the future role of printing will be to the PV
sector and which equipment firms are having success selling into this
sector. We also discuss such matters as the tradeoffs between low
manufacturing costs and cell efficiencies, the importance of economies of
scale, integration of manufacturing facilities, approaches to manufacturing
new cell types, etc.
This report analyzes the state of the art in fabrication of both the
manufacture of the photoactive layers themselves and the metallization
process. We analyze the available data on how successful each approach to
the manufacture of thin-film and organic PV is currently being and where
the firms active in this space are looking for improvements and
breakthroughs. In addition to the analysis itself, this report includes
profiles of the manufacturing operations of 15 firms involved in producing
solar products in the TFPV and OPV sector.