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The tutorial will begin by surveying the properties and availability of sunlight, introducing the necessary measures and some commonly used data sources. A simple thermodynamic model for solar power conversion will be established to place an upper bound to the conversion efficiency of a photovoltaic cell.

The limits imposed by real materials will then be considered. First, the processes involved in absorption of photons in materials are introduced. Then it, will then be shown that extracting current from a semiconductor absorber leads to the usual measures for solar cell performance, short-circuit current, open-circuit voltage and fill factor and introduces additional constraints to photovoltaic power conversion leading to the Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit.

The carrier transport and recombination processes that are present in practical solar cells will be discussed. Key solar cell quality parameters will be introduced to give a conceptual understanding of material and device requirements for a high-efficiency solar cell. Characterisation methods such as dark current, quantum efficiency and, photoluminescence, and electroluminescence are discussed as means for understanding carrier lifetime and diffusion length, optical and resistive losses.

Having established a conceptual framework for PV devices the present laboratory status, manufacturing processes for several solar cell technologies will be reviewed, including:

• crystalline silicon
• III-V (2-terminal multi-junction)
• CdTe
• Perovskite, single junction and multi-junction with silicon

The tutorial will conclude with a brief perspective on the feasibility of deploying new materials in future power grids, including a consideration of the importance of PV material stability.

As land scarcity and land use conflicts are acknowledged as important barriers for the development of PV in many countries, Agrivoltaics and Floating PV provide a huge opportunity to achieve national energy targets for PV. Moreover, these integrated approaches to PV also offer the opportunity to solve concerns regarding the landscape transformation through an appropriate design. The key proposition is “combining land uses for multiple purposes on the same space with innovative designs and technologies”. Therefore, Agrivoltaics and Floating PV are more than just PV electricity generation technologies. For example, the partial shade of PV modules is beneficial for several crops and the modules themselves offer mechanical protection to the crops, and floating PV systems can be hybridised with existing hydropower stations. The lecture will provide an overview of the different technologies, the state-of-the-art in system designs and upcoming technology trends, but also address critical issues such as regulatory approvals, as well as social and environmental aspects.

Solar energy has been recognized as one of the best candidates to lead the energy transition. Besides its massive deployment, the photovoltaic industry has an important role to play by opening prospects to sustainable and circular models. In this context, end-of-life management is one of the topics that should be carefully considered. This lecture will introduce photovoltaic waste management, including recycling approaches and development. From a global overview, the session will cover policy, regulations, and technological development, as well as trends and challenges for the next decades.

Tandem solar cells offer avenues to increase efficiency beyond the current state of the art for commercial photovoltaics. New absorbers and device structures including hybrids that combine different material classes such as III-V/Si or perovskite/Si are intensely researched. To guide the evolution of tandem solar cells towards commercialization, accurate measurements of performance are required. In this tutorial we will discuss how an accurate performance calibration for a tandem cell or module is done and present common measurement artifacts and methods to identify and avoid them.

As land scarcity and land use conflicts are acknowledged as important barriers for the development of PV in many countries, Agrivoltaics and Floating PV provide a huge opportunity to achieve national energy targets for PV. Moreover, these integrated approaches to PV also offer the opportunity to solve concerns regarding the landscape transformation through an appropriate design. The key proposition is “combining land uses for multiple purposes on the same space with innovative designs and technologies”. Therefore, Agrivoltaics and Floating PV are more than just PV electricity generation technologies. For example, the partial shade of PV modules is beneficial for several crops and the modules themselves offer mechanical protection to the crops, and floating PV systems can be hybridised with existing hydropower stations. The lecture will provide an overview of the different technologies, the state-of-the-art in system designs and upcoming technology trends, but also address critical issues such as regulatory approvals, as well as social and environmental aspects.

Solar energy has been recognized as one of the best candidates to lead the energy transition. Besides its massive deployment, the photovoltaic industry has an important role to play by opening prospects to sustainable and circular models. In this context, end-of-life management is one of the topics that should be carefully considered. This lecture will introduce photovoltaic waste management, including recycling approaches and development. From a global overview, the session will cover policy, regulations, and technological development, as well as trends and challenges for the next decades.

The development of perovskite materials towards photovoltaic applications has revolutionized the PV R&D community in just over a decade. Whilst continued fundamental work will help drive these technologies closer to their theoretical limits, in industrial settings we are tackling the necessary challenges to bringing these once-in-a-generation materials to market. This lecture will communicate the current-status and remaining challenges for mass deployment, as well as describe how fundamental multi-disciplinary science is at the core of making the step from lab to fab.

Silicon solar cells are the backbone of the photovoltaic industry. Champion solar cell efficiencies up to 26.8% have recently been reported, while efficiencies in high volume production now routinely exceed 24%. These incredible achievements, which even experts in the field would have considered fanciful a few years ago, rely significantly on the availability and systematic application of sophisticated characterization and inspection methods and systems. This lecture reviews some of the most common characterization techniques for solar cells and modules, and their application in R&D, in production and in the field.

Photovoltaics is expected to become the dominant pillar of global energy production with the global energy system transition to 100% renewable energy. As PV scales up globally, questions arise about the availability of resources, the cost, environmental and social impact of PV production, and the modules recyclability at end-of-life. After an introduction of the PV value chain stages, related technologies, and market situation, this lecture will give an overview on methodologies for the economic, ecologic, social assessment of photovoltaics and give insights to related analyses of state-of-the-art and emerging PV technologies.