Manufacturing cost modeling for flexible organic solar cells

Solar energy is an abundant source of renewable energy. With increasing demand for energy generation to meet rising energy needs, there is immense interest in electricity generation from solar power using photovoltaic cells (PV). While conventional silicon PVs (Si-PVs) dominate the current solar PV market, wide adoption is limited mainly due to the high cost of silicon and related processing. In contrast, emerging technologies such as organic material based PVs can be fabricated as thin flexible sheets using conventional printing techniques, and have the potential of saving significant materials and costs as well as reducing environmental impact. Despite having limitations in power conversion efficiencies, OPVs have the potential to displace traditional Si-PVs and enable new market applications, and it is therefore worthwhile to understand their production economics. This paper presents a technical-economic cost model (TCM) analysis based on three manufacturing processes defined by IDME Technologies Corporation (IDME). The TCM was used to investigate the manufacturing cost of scaling up production of OPVs to three different annual production volumes, and to make recommendations for production scale-up. The findings suggest that an automated semi-continuous process is the most suitable manufacturing process for the widest range of production volumes in a cost-effective manner.