Material research for photovoltaics - from lab to market

Manufactured by Bell Labs in 1954, first modern silicon solar cells exhibited an efficiency of 6%. Research has continuously pushed this limit higher and reached 26.7% for a single-junction silicon solar cell in 2017. The family of different types of solar cells expanded in the lab as well as in commercial manufacturing and the installation of solar photovoltaic electricity generation systems still follows an exponential growth rate. In 1999, 45 years after the first modern silicon solar cells had been released, the cumulative installed photovoltaic electricity generation capacity reached 1 GW and by 2012 the total installed PV capacity reached 100 GW. Only five years later, in 2017, t100 GW became the annual market volume. As a consequence, the total world-wide installed photovoltaic electricity generation capacity exceeded 630 GW by the end of 2019.