IBM has set a world record for conversion efficiency of a solar cell made with earth-abundant materials.

One of the challenges of the solar industry is the amount of energy required to process silicon for standard solar cells and the reliance of rare-earth metals for use in thin film solar cell production. As the term suggests, the materials used for the latter are scarce and expensive - and some elements such as the cadmium used in CdTe solar panels also pose potential health and environmental issues.

A great deal of research is going into using common metals in the production of solar cells in order to address these issues.

IBM’s Materials Science team, in partnership with Solar Frontier and others, has been working on developing an efficient and affordable PV cell made of abundant natural materials.

The efforts have been successful, with a cell created made of copper, zinc and tin (CZTS) achieving a conversion efficiency of 11.1 percent; a 10 percent improvement on any other cell in its class.

Additionally, the CZTS solar cell can be made using simple ink-based techniques such as printing or casting. The solution can be directly deposited on low-cost substrates such as glass, metal or plastic foil.

IBM says a cell of this nature could potentially be manufactured in massive quantities each year.

“The focus of our joint-development team remains to further increase this device efficiency and transfer the technology to environmentally-friendly, high-throughput industrial manufacturing,” states a post on IBM’s blog.

“The hope is that within several years this new class of photovoltaic materials will begin to contribute to the wider availability of lower-cost solar electricity.”

Tokyo-based Solar Frontier is the world’s leader in CIS (Copper, Indium, Selenium) thin film solar panel production and operates a gigawatt-scale production plant in Japan; one of the world’s biggest solar panel factories. The company is a subsidiary of Showa Shell Sekiyu KK.