Abstract :
Cadmium telluride is a promising photovoltaic material for thin-film solar cells. However, further improvements on
performance and reproducibility of devices have been limited by the conventional SnO2/poly-CdS/poly-CdTe device
structure used for more than 30 years. In this paper, we review partial R&Dapproaches at NREL to understand
the issues related to the conventional device structure and to develop several novel materials and a modified device
structure for minimizing these issues. We have achieved a CdTe polycrystalline thin-film solar cell demonstrating an
NREL-confirmed, total-area efficiency of 16.5% by using new materials and the modified device structure. To apply
the high-efficiency CdTe cell fabrication technique, we developed two manufacturing processes for producing high-efficiency
CdTe modules with the potential of high throughput and low cost.
2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
