AUTHOR=Le Donne Alessia , Trifiletti Vanira , Binetti Simona 

TITLE=New Earth-Abundant Thin Film Solar Cells Based on Chalcogenides

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Chemistry

VOLUME=7

YEAR=2019

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/chemistry/articles/10.3389/fchem.2019.00297

DOI=10.3389/fchem.2019.00297

ISSN=2296-2646

ABSTRACT=<p>At the end of 2017 roughly 1.8% of the worldwide electricity came from solar photovoltaics (PV), which is foreseen to have a key role in all major future energy scenarios with an installed capacity around 5 TW by 2050. Despite silicon solar cells currently rule the PV market, the extremely more versatile thin film-based devices (mainly Cu(In,Ga)Se<sub>2</sub> and CdTe ones) have almost matched them in performance and present room for improvement. The low availability of some elements in the present commercially available PV technologies and the recent strong fall of silicon module price below 1 $/W<sub>p</sub> focused the attention of the scientific community on cheap earth-abundant materials. In this framework, thin film solar cells based on Cu<sub>2</sub>ZnSnS<sub>4</sub> (CZTS) and the related sulfur selenium alloy Cu<sub>2</sub>ZnSn(S,Se)<sub>4</sub> (CZTSSe) were strongly investigated in the last 10 years. More recently, chalcogenide PV absorbers potentially able to face TW range applications better than CZTS and CZTSSe due to the higher abundance of their constituting elements are getting considerable attention. They are based on both MY<sub>2</sub> (where <italic>M</italic> = Fe, Cu, Sn and <italic>Y</italic> = S and/or Se) and Cu<sub>2</sub>XSnY<sub>4</sub> (where <italic>X</italic> = Fe, Mn, Ni, Ba, Co, Cd and <italic>Y</italic> = S and/or Se) chalcogenides. In this work, an extensive review of emerging earth-abundant thin film solar cells based on both MY<sub>2</sub> and Cu<sub>2</sub>XSnY<sub>4</sub> species is given, along with some considerations on the abundance and annual production of their constituting elements.</p>