Abstract
At the end of 2017 roughly 1.8% of the worldwide electricity came from solar photovoltaics (PV), which is foreseen to have a key role in all major future energy scenarios with an installed capacity around 5 TW by 2050. Despite silicon solar cells currently rule the PV market, the extremely more versatile thin film-based devices (mainly Cu(In,Ga)Se2 and CdTe ones) have almost matched them in performance and present room for improvement. The low availability of some elements in the present commercially available PV technologies and the recent strong fall of silicon module price below 1 $/Wp focused the attention of the scientific community on cheap earth-abundant materials. In this framework, thin film solar cells based on Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) and the related sulfur selenium alloy Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 (CZTSSe) were strongly investigated in the last 10 years. More recently, chalcogenide PV absorbers potentially able to face TW range applications better than CZTS and CZTSSe due to the higher abundance of their constituting elements are getting considerable attention. They are based on both MY2 (where M = Fe, Cu, Sn and Y = S and/or Se) and Cu2XSnY4 (where X = Fe, Mn, Ni, Ba, Co, Cd and Y = S and/or Se) chalcogenides. In this work, an extensive review of emerging earth-abundant thin film solar cells based on both MY2 and Cu2XSnY4 species is given, along with some considerations on the abundance and annual production of their constituting elements.
Highlights
In the last decades, the fast increase of the global energy demand and the progressive run-up in the world oil price, along with the growing global pollution strongly pointed out the need of an affordable and sustainable clean energy supply
We are aware that the success of such emerging chalcogenide materials in the PV market will depend on many variables
In the last few years the performance of emerging chalcogenide solar cells was significantly progressing, further improvements are needed to achieve the efficiency required for the practical use
Summary
The fast increase of the global energy demand and the progressive run-up in the world oil price, along with the growing global pollution strongly pointed out the need of an affordable and sustainable clean energy supply. The above mentioned limitations include the relevant energy amount required to fabricate c-Si solar cells and the low availability of one or more elements present in CdTe (i.e., Te), CIGS (i.e., In and Ga), c-Si and thin-film Si (i.e., Ag used as contact) PV devices (Tao et al, 2011) (see Figure 1, USGS; WebElements) To overcome this problem, in the last 10 years thin films based on earth abundant elements were strongly investigated as PV absorbers, in particular, Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) and the related sulfur selenium alloy Cu2ZnSn(S,Se) (CZTSSe). Sulfur is the 17th most common element in the Earth’s crust (420 ppm) and generally the fifth most common on Earth (WebElements) It is present on Earth in its pure, native form, sulfur usually occurs as sulfide and sulfate minerals, such as pyrite (iron sulfide), galena (lead sulfide), sphalerite (zinc sulfide), cinnabar (mercury sulfide), stibnite (antimony sulfide), alunite (potassium aluminum sulfate), gypsum (calcium sulfate), and barite (barium sulfate) (Anthony et al, 1990). Around 2’250’000 tons of nickel are produced annually worldwide (USGS), Ni is used in a plethora of applications: about 68% of world production for stainless steel, 9% for corrosion-resistant nickel plating, 10% for nickel and copper -based alloys, 7% for alloy steels, 3% in foundries, and 4% in other applications, including the fast-growing battery sector (Nickel Institute)
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