The Empa laboratory in Switzerland has succeeded in improving the efficiency of CIGS solar cells to 20.8% – breaking its own record by 0.4%. The technology of choice is copper indium gallium diselenide (Cu(In,Ga)Se2), or CIGS, which enables the manufacture of flexible, lightweight solar cells on polymer foils. A detailed description of the scientific findings was published in the special issue ‘ Excellence in Energy ’ of the journal ‘Advanced Energy Materials’.

“Such high efficiency as we have now achieved in our laboratory demonstrates the potential of the technology. Future developments will be aimed in particular at transferring our new process from laboratory to industrial scale in order to increase power generation and profitability of photovoltaic systems,” says Ayodhya N. Tiwari, head of the Empa research group. Flexible CIGS solar modules are already commercially available. Among the suppliers is Empa spin-off Flisom , which was co-founded by Tiwari.