Green energy visions: personal views on the future of photovoltaics

This opening plenary presentation is to honour the award to the author of a Right Livelihood Award, also known as an "Alternative Nobel Prize", in the Swedish Parliament in December, 2002. In this presentation, the author gives his views on the future of photovoltaics. He argues that current bulk wafer and ribbon approaches are too material intensive to allow the low costs required for photovoltaics to reach its full potential. A transition to thin-film technology is essential for this to occur. The reasons as to why this transition has been so difficult to achieve are then explored. The author identifies a certain "lack of robustness" of the candidate thin-films as the key reason for their failure. He provides evidence that this is not a universal thin-film feature, but demonstrates that modules even more robust than standard bulk silicon are possible, given an appropriate materials selection. It is then argued that a sensible strategy for companies feeling the pressure on prices being applied by the large manufacturers is not to try to compete on volume, but exploit the lower manufacturing costs per unit volume possible with more recent, rugged thin-films.