Proceedings of the 2014 E-MRS spring meeting symposium Y—Advanced materials and characterization techniques for solar cells II

During the last decade, the photovoltaics world market has been growing enormously, leading to a substantial price reduction of photovoltaic energy so that grid parity has been reached in many parts of the world. In this way, photovoltaics has shown its huge potential to fulfill the green energy demand and to allow a transition towards a clean, safe and decentralized electricity supply. At the same time, cell and module efficiencies have been increasing steadily during the last decade in laboratory and pilot line environments for all different photovoltaic technologies. The challenge of the scientific photovoltaic community in the coming years remains to achieve high device efficiencies at low cost in large production volumes. To be able to do this, innovative and new technologies are needed to enable future industrial high-efficiency device architectures. Extensive material research will have to play a key role in this, since research and development are even more than in the past essential for further progress of the PV technology