Introduction

Experimental Procedures

References

SUMMARY

The significant capital expense of photovoltaics manufacturing has made it difficult for new cell and module technologies to enter the market. We present two technoeconomic models that analyze the sustainable growth of perovskite manufacturing for an R2R single-junction technology and a perovskite-silicon tandem module, focusing on the impacts of economies of scale and average selling price on profitability. We establish a cost range of $3.30/W to $0.53/W for flexible modules manufactured in factory sizes ranging from 0.3 MW/year to 1 GW/year. In addition, we model the cost to manufacture a tandem module consisting of a single-junction perovskite cell stacked in 4-terminal configuration onto a silicon cell and show how an existing manufacturer can grow at a faster rate by co-investing in tandems. Our analyses highlight potential routes to market for perovskite photovoltaics and the possibility to sustainably grow a photovoltaics manufacturing company even in markets with higher labor rates.

INTRODUCTION

To mitigate the impacts of climate change, tens of terawatts of solar power must be deployed over the next decades. With 500 GW of photovoltaics (PVs) installed globally to date, silicon photovoltaics remains the incumbent technology with its cost now at 0.25 $/W and declining capex. The rapid growth of installed photovoltaics continues to surprise even the experts, but for solar power to become the primary source of electricity globally, a large-scale and truly global manufacturing base is required that will not be able to rely on one region or technology. In light of this, perovskite photovoltaics offer a strong alternative photovoltaic technology with the potential for extremely low manufacturing costs through solution processing that could compete with silicon. However, new cleantech technologies have historically struggled to scale-up with their capital intensity resulting in long timelines for commercialization that are incompatible with traditional venture capital funding models, that lead to lower success rates for cleantech startups compared to software and medical ventures. In this paper, we use bottom-up cost modeling to explore economically sustainable strategies for one new cleantech innovation, solution-processed perovskite photovoltaics, to scale-up and enter the mature solar power market. Our goal is to help illuminate one or more pathways that could enable this groundbreaking technology to successfully scale-up and navigate the journey from lab bench to market.