The ongoing saga of copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide photovoltaics provided one of the talking-point touchstones of this year’s Solar Power International show. Will solar historians look back to 2010 as the beginning of the Production Age of CIGS? That may be presumptuous and premature, since the thin-film PV’s slice of the overall solar shipment/deployment pie remains small.
But a growing number of companies have signed large supply deals and have been shipping megawatts of modules every month for rooftop and ground-mount projects. Manufacturing capabilities and capacities have increased many-fold and will continue to do so, while the nascent commercialization of flexible CIGS panels points to the disruptive possibility of a building-integrated PV market insurgency.
Using the time-honored method of issuing press releases in conjunction with a major tradeshow, a host of companies both familiar and surprising tapped into the CIGS newswire during SPI 2010. During the course of the week, I spoke with several key players from the sector who offered updates on their own companies’ progress in the market.
Korean megacorp Hyundai Heavy Industries will join forces with fellow multinational and current CIGS player (via its Avancis unit) and big-time glass supplier Saint-Gobain to build a 100MW fab in South Korea.
Showa Shell subsidiary Solar Frontier will be supplying GE with private-branded versions of its CIS modules, and in return the PV manufacturer will benefit from GE’s prodigious chops in the utility-scale power plant business.
Ascent Solar scored a certification coup, becoming the first flexible CIGS panelist to achieve the full IEC 61646 environmental testing stamp of approval.
Another large corporate entity participating in the CIGS sector, 3M, officially launched its Ultra Barrier film, arguably the key enabling material set for roll-to-roll processed, flex CIGS, CdTe, and organic PV thin-film modules.
The rap against flexible CIGS has been its lack of durability and the photoactive film stack’s extreme allergy to even trace amounts of moisture. 3M’s transparent compound protects the CIGS absorber layers from the wet stuff, and has been engineered for the long haul to weather the elements found in rooftop settings.
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