News Article
XsunX Capitalizes on the “Darling of the Solar Industry”: CIGS
IBIS Associates says that portions of the global PV market utilizing multi-crystalline silicon solar cells could achieve savings of over $646 million by replacing only 500 megawatts with XsunX CIGS by 2015.
XsunX, a developer of advanced, thin-film photovoltaic (TFPV) solar cell technologies and manufacturing processes has had favorable results from a study conducted by IBIS Associates.
The firm focused on Copper Indium Gallium (di)-Selenide, (CIGS) thin-film technology.
IBIS is a technology strategy and business development consultancy company specializing in advanced materials and manufacturing technologies. The company looked at the potential impact of XsunX's hybrid solar technology, ‘CIGSolar’, on the global solar photovoltaic (PV) market in terms of efficiency and savings.
The study projects that portions of the Global PV market utilizing multi-crystalline silicon solar cells could achieve savings of over $646 million by replacing only 500 megawatts of multi-crystalline silicon usage with new XsunX CIGS based solar cells by 2015.
The study's five year projection utilized XsunX's Joint Venture licensing model under which it plans to deploy manufacturing capacity of CIGSolar which is currently under development by XsunX.
The savings were determined by utilizing the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL's) Solar Advisor Model which forecasts the savings from the projected efficiency gains of CIGSolar technology as a replacement for the use of multi-crystalline silicon cells.
"With the industry's renewed focus on CIGS untapped potential, we believe we are positioned to reach the market at an optimal time," said Tom Djokovich, CEO, XsunX. "It became very clear to us at the InterSolar conference in San Francisco this month that CIGS was becoming the "darling" of the solar industry, and XsunX is working to capitalize on this timing."
The Company's development objectives for CIGSolar, which were launched last fall, include leveraging and adapting expertise and cross-cutting technologies from the hard disk media and high-speed flex circuit printing industries with thin-film CIGS techniques in the mass production of individual CIGS solar cells.
The idea to reach outside of the solar industry to adapt useful technologies from other industries has begun to take a broader hold as evidenced by a recent U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research grant that tasked the renewable energy industry "to identify and accelerate the development of cross-cutting and unique products or processes that are expected to have a disruptive impact on the photovoltaics (PV) industry."
Of all the PV materials, CIGS exhibits the largest performance "gap" between CIGS laboratory efficiencies and average commercial module efficiencies, a gap of approximately 50% below laboratory efficiency.
Many experts believe the reason for the difference between laboratory and commercial efficiencies is normal compositional variation associated with scaling from laboratory processes that focus on smaller areas to large area commercial production. XsunX's new approach aims to eliminate the variations while maintaining commercial production volumes.
IBIS also reported that "XsunX's PV Cell technology in many ways can be thought of as a "drop-in" replacement for the current multi-crystalline silicon cell value stream, with the notable exception that it is much more capital efficient and cost effective. Moreover, XsunX's CIGS PV cells have the potential to eventually "outstrip" the baseline mc-Si cell in terms of conversion efficiency."
Based in Aliso Viejo California XsunX, is developing CIGSolar, a new hybrid manufacturing solution to produce high performance thin-film CIGS solar cells. The firm says these CIGS solar cells may soon offer a non-toxic, high-efficiency and lowest-cost alternative to the use of silicon solar cells currently used to manufacture nearly 80% of all solar modules world wide.
The firm claims its CIGSolar solution offers the potential to revolutionize the solar industry with the highest yield CIGS manufacturing technology available in the market today that combines robust state-of-the-art magnetic media manufacturing technologies derived from the hard disc (HD) media industry with proprietary thin film solar manufacturing processes.
