Featured in The fertile solar crescent – 01-2018

Building new markets

Thin film and BIPV: Thanks to their light weight and potential to be deployed on glass and other materials, thin film PV solutions show strong potential in building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV). CIGS is seen by many in the industry as a particularly suitable technology for these applications, and as the first of several factories is brought online in China, pv magazine looks at the potential for this and other thin film technologies in the nascent market for BIPV.

By

Mark Hutchins

16 Jan 2018

A rooftop featuring Solar Frontier’s SmaCIS modules. The company has plans to develop BIPV products, as part of Japan’s push for all new buildings to be ‘Zero Energy’ by 2020. | Image: Solar Frontier

As solar continues on its pathway to represent a significant portion of the world’s energy supply, the industry is searching for new ways to grow. In particular, markets such as Japan and Taiwan, which have exhausted the majority of space available for rooftop and ground-mounted solar, require more surfaces from which to generate solar electricity.Elsewhere, …

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