Solar panels need to stop relying on scarce, expensive, or toxic elements like indium, gallium, and cadmium if they are ever to be manufactured at the terawatt scale needed for a 2050 clean-energy grid. Current thin-film solar technologies—copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) and cadmium telluride (CdTe)—already meet the requirements for low cost, low carbon footprint, and building integration, and they hold about 10% of the global PV market. But the key elements in their active layers are too rare, costly, or toxic to sustain the massive expansion required. PVTEAM aims to replace those materials with Earth-abundant alternatives—binary, ternary, and quaternary chalcogenides and oxides—and to develop scalable, non-vacuum manufacturing processes that can be taken up directly by industry. If successful, the project could unlock a new generation of thin-film solar modules that are cheap, non-toxic, and made from widely available elements. This would remove a critical bottleneck in the global solar supply chain and allow the UK to capture a significant share of the manufacturing market. The consortium includes Tata Steel, Pilkington NSG, and Johnson Matthey, giving the work a direct route into construction, coating, and chemical industries.
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To meet teraWatt photovoltaic (PV) capacity targets for 2050, solar modules will require: 1. Low manufacturing costs and carbon footprint as well as short energy payback time 2. To be incorporated into building-integrated systems 3. To be based on low-cost abundant elements Current thin-film PV technologies based on copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) and cadmium telluride (CdTe) have already demonstrated their potential to deliver on the first two requirements. These technologies are currently manufactured at the GW scale, with approximately 10% of the PV market worldwide. However, low abundance, high costs and high toxicity of key elements (In, Ga and Cd) present in active layers are set to severely limit the expansion of this technology in the next decades. Consequently, material substitution and the development of scalable (non-vacuum) processing technologies represent an extraordinary opportunity for the UK to grab an important share of the global photovoltaic market. The aim of PVTEAM is to lay the foundations of sustainable thin-film PV technology based on Earth abundant materials and scalable manufacturing processes. This will be achieved by developing processes and production technologies for materials and material systems to a level they can be taken up by manufacturing industries. This programme covers material specifications and performance, integration into cells and mini-modules as well as developing the technologies required for scale up. PVTEAM will specify a carefully selected range of binary, ternary and quaternary chalcogenides and oxides as substitutes to proven commercial materials. Using a multi-level screening approach, we will incorporate the best performing candidates into industrial processes based on "substrate" and "superstrate" configurations. The consortium involves five universities with state-of-the-art infrastructure for material development and characterisation as well as for device fabrication, testing and integration into PV modules. Material processing will be based on facilities available at the Sustainable Product Engineering Centre (SPECIFIC), which will be in charge of designing scale-up strategies and preparing techno-economic assessment. The PVTEAM industrial partners, Tata Steel, Pilkington NSG and Johnson Matthey, have a worldwide footprint on materials for the construction, coating and chemical industries. The consortium also includes SMEs, M-Solve and Semimetrics, which will provide means for the exploitation of new PVTEAM technologies in module fabrication and metrology.
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