Terawatt Solar Photovoltaics ― Roadblocks and Opportunities

Solar energy will undoubtedly become a main source of energy in our life by the end of this century, but how big of a role will photovoltaics play in this new energy infrastructure? Besides cost and efficiency, there are other barriers for current solar cell technologies to become a noticeable source of energy in the future. Availability of raw materials, energy input, storage of solar electricity, and recycling of dead modules can all prevent or hinder a tangible impact by solar photovoltaics. This book is intended for readers with minimal technical background and aims to explore not only the fundamentals but also major issues in large-scale deployment of solar photovoltaics. Thought-provoking ideas to overcoming some of the barriers are discussed.

Dr. Meng Tao is currently a Professor of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University. His career started in 1983 when he worked on amorphous silicon deposition as a graduate student at Zhejiang University. He spent the next nine years with the State Key Lab for Silicon Materials in Hangzhou, China. After his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998, he resumed his photovoltaic research. He pursues solution fabrication of Earth abundant high-efficiency chalcogenide solar cells for terawatt-scale deployment. He also pioneered a new surface passivation technique for semiconductors, valence-mending passivation, with applications in both silicon photovoltaics and microelectronics. His current research covers a wide range of topics in photovoltaics, including 1) analysis of resource limitations to terawatt-scale photovoltaics; 2) new surface and grain boundary passivation techniques for silicon photovoltaics and high-temperature silicon electronics, 3) Earth abundant chalcogenides for post-silicon terawatt photovoltaics, and 4) energy-efficient low-cost electrochemical routes to solar-grade silicon.