Emerging Antimony and Bismuth Chalcogenides—Towards Large Scale Deployment of Customized PV in the Future

Development of new photovoltaic (PV) technologies based on novel green materials with higher efficiency and lower cost options could create a new industry with independent supply chains, foster IoT market diversification, and attenuate market volatility. Sb and Bi -chalcogenide compounds have recently gained increasing attention as defect tolerant, non-toxic and highly stable materials for earth abundant thin film polycrystalline PV technology. Despite of their recent addition to the thin film device value chain, efficiency values of these materials have climbed rapidly and are now approaching 11%. Yet despite of this rapid progress, there is still headroom to increase performance significantly by addressing both, fundamental material challenges and innovation in device designing and development. This presentation will review the most relevant progress achieved for Sb and Bi-chalcogenides thin film PV, with the emphasis on key processing strategies to optimize absorber material and thin film solar cells properties (doping and alloying), understanding of buried interfaces and push the boundaries of understanding and performance. Based on the state-of-the art progress in performance of emerging Sb and Bi -chalcogenide PV materials, a roadmap of customized PV application variability, including semitransparent and tandem PV devices for BIPV, PIPV and IoT markets will be presented.