Disruptive Photovoltaic Technologies Can Accelerate Global Decarbonization
This contribution explores PV manufacturing capacity expansion trajectories needed to achieve the goal of global decarbonization assuming that investors make financially rational decisions avoiding stranded production assets while still effectively exploiting experience curve benefits in both manufacturing process and product design. Substantial production cost savings and timely decarbonization risk mitigation could accrue by adoption and scaling of high efficiency multijunction device architectures and thin film direct bandgap semiconductor technologies that provide lower manufacturing capital intensity. We demonstrate that there is a $1-2 trillion market opportunity for such disruptive technologies while also providing hundreds of billions of dollars of cost savings to reach total decarbonization.