Thin-Film Solar Cells, Other Than Those Which Use A Form of Silicon, Are Not Practical Due To Natural Resource Limitations

Implications: There are two non-silicon chemistries now being hyped as the bases for thin-film solar cells: 1. Cadmium telluride, and 2. Copper Indium Gallium Selenide Neither is practical at all.

Analysis: If you Google my name," Jack Lifton," along with the term, "solar," you will find articles where  have written the details off why non-silicon based thin-film solar cells are not only not practical they are impossible to produce in any meaningful volume.

I have been accused of being anti-solar and ignorant of natural resource economics. I am neither the one nor the other.

There is simply no possibility of increasing the production of cadmium, indium, gallium, tellurium, or selenium to any volume remotely near what would be needed to make enough thin film solar cells to make even a dent in total global demand for electricity production. The US today has an installed capacity of 4,200 gigawatts. Of this total, the current total from solar of all types is 0.6 gigawatts.

Using all of the globes resources of the metals highlighted in italics above, and thereby shutting down the manufacturing of integrated circuit based electronics, LCDs, and plasma displays would add, perhaps, the ability to produce 60 or 60 gigawatts of electricity per year for a world today needing a capacity today of more than 10,000 gigawatts. Non-silicon thin-film solar, using present technologies, would be simply a diversion of limited resources for a marginal use.

It doesn't matter whether or not the earth's crust contains enough of the rare elements to make it possible to manufacture a huge number of thin-film solar cells. We can only use the materials that are accessible to our civilization in ore deposits that are concentred enough, so that we can recover the metals economically. There are no primary mines for any of the non-silicon metals named here. All are obtained as byproducts of the mining of base metals, such as copper, zinc, and lead. There is no possibility of increasing the global production of copper, zinc, or lead to the volumes it would take to make the production of the byproducts cadmium, indium, gallium, selenium, or tellurium sufficient to sustain a thin-film solar cell industry.