9. Conclusions

8. Future aspects

146 Emerging Solar Energy Materials

Moreover, research institute NREL, USA and Fraunhofer ISE, Germany periodically publish the status reports on different stages of CIGS developments [49–52]. These reports greatly promote technology developments and industrialization of thin-film CIGS produces. Although, many challenges still lie ahead including optimization and control on the CIGS absorber film stoichi-

At presents, of monocrystalline and multicrystalline Si PV production, are dominant in the PV market, but the importance of TFSC will steadily rise in the coming decade. After that, in recent years the CIGS already win its own counterparts such as CdTe and a-Si (Figure 18) [53].

ometry, interface, and film uniformity over large areas for the power module fabrication.

Figure 18. Thin-film technologies worldwide annual PV module production inMWp.

Figure 19. Closing the gap between laboratory cells and modules.

In this chapter, we introduced the material designs on chemical compositions and compared some of the most important academic solar cell simulators. However, these simulators cannot load many files one by one and inevitably one analytic simulator favored especially for the nonstoichiometric PV materials, based on defect concentration of the CIGS alloy. This is the first phase to develop the comprehensive intelligent design (materials/devices/process). For industrial applications, much more refined detail work must be undertaken to further fulfill the need of PV cells for non-stoichiometric materials in a large area. For improving the process flow and performance of CIGS photovoltaic a fundamental improvement on the manufacturing technology and use of the concept of intelligent design are necessary. As CIGS PV technology matures to production on an industrial scale, the long-term stability becomes more important, which affects the cost the competitiveness of PV electricity and both the degradation rate of CIGS modules from a field test and their failure modes are listed. Moreover, the progress of thin film solar cells based on CZTS (Cu2ZnSnS4) is briefed, which shows future direction of material development of CIGS.
