A solution for reducing manufacturing costs for CIGS solar panels?

Although CIGS (copper-indium-gallium-selenide) solar panels use less raw materials and are cheaper to manufacture than the more expensive crystalline silicon panels, manufacturing them on a commercial scale has proven more difficult. Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science are looking to change that with a new development that provides a low-cost solution processing method for CIGS-based solar cells.

A team from the university may now have found a low-cost solution processing method with the potential for large-scale production for their CIGS solar cells.
Although efficiency levels of up to 20 percent have been achieved elsewhere, the processing method is expensive which makes manufacturing costs uncompetitive with current grid prices. With this new method, the scientists are able to reach the same efficiency levels whilst bringing the cost of manufacturing down significantly.

The copper-indium-diselenide thin-film solar cells developed by the team achieved 7.5 percent efficiency in the published study but have in a short amount of time already improved to 9.13 percent in the lab.

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