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Bright Opportunities for Indium 
This article is based in part on research from Indium Markets for Photovoltaics 

The indium market is dominated by a single product: indium tin oxide (ITO)—the main
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transparent conductor used by the display industry and others requiring both conductiv ity and
transparency in the same material. The photovoltaics (PV) industry does consume some of this
ITO, but it is certainly not the largest consumer. Instead, PV represents the fastest growing
application for indium, even when excluding the ITO portion of this consumption.

Growth in the PV industry in the last decade has yielded tremendous opportunities not only for the
companies that make the actual solar cells and modules, but for materials firms, including indium
producers, as well. Continued growth, especially in thin-film PV (TFPV), will provide even more
such opportunities.

This rapid growth in indium consumption is predicted largely because of the emergence and
growth of CIGS photovoltaics. Indium is critical to CIGS PV because it is a major component of the
absorber layer, the copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) material. While CIGS PV has not yet
achieved volumes as high as some of the other TFPV technologies such as a-Si and CdTe (despite
high hopes and expectations for the last few years), it has the highest demonstrated efficiency of
all the TFPV technologies (20.0 percent), approaching that of crystalline silicon PV cells. Combined
with the benefits generally associated with all of the TFPV technologies—light weight, potential
flexibility, and anticipated lower cost—NanoMarkets expects CIGS PV to gain a large share of the
TFPV market over the next eight years. As a result, the CIGS material will become the second
largest use of indium in that time, accounting for around 10 percent of worldwide indium
consumption.

ITO's Role in PV Evolves

The oldest, and most widely used PV technology—crystalline silicon (c-Si) PV—does not use ITO as
the transparent conductor. While the front electrodes of any PV cell must allow light through, there
are two general approaches to do this. The first, which most TFPV technologies use, relies on a
transparent conductor, mainly ITO. The second approach, the one taken by c-Si PV cells involves
silver patterned into fine line structures (called fingers) that only block a portion of the incident
light from entering the underly ing cell.
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With the advent of a-Si PV cells in the 1980s in portable, low-power applications like solar
calculators, ITO began to make a significant showing in the PV market. These thin-film cells do not
have the carrier mobility of doped crystalline silicon, so their surfaces must be unif ormly coated
with a conductor to effectively capture the carriers generated in the cell, and the conductor must
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be transparent to allow light into the cell. ITO was then, as it is now, the established "standard"
transparent conductor, which was used for the front electrodes of a-Si PV cells. ITO worked well in
these rigid a-Si PV cells on glass substrates, but it was expensiv e. Although the price of indium had
come down from its highs of the nuclear power heyday, it was still over $200 per kilogram on
average in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Besides its cost (due to its high indium content), other characteristics of ITO make it less than
perfect as a transparent conductor. It is neither very transparent nor very conductiv e as materials
go; rather it simply represents a good trade-off between transparency and conductiv ity. It is also
fairly brittle, and thus not particularly suited to any application in which flexibility is key. Also, ITO
does not easily lend itself to low-temperature manufacturing processes, limiting the processes that
can be used with it. Still, in the applications that use ITO the most (mostly displays of various
types), ITO is by far the dominant transparent conductor.

TFPV is an exception to this clear-cut dominance of ITO. ITO's limitations have caused the newst
of the PV technologies to shy away from it for the most part. CdTe PV, brought into high-volume
manufacturing by First Solar, uses tin oxide as the transparent conductor for its front electrode.
CIGS PV, not yet as high in volume but commercialized to a significant extent, uses aluminum-
doped zinc oxide (AZO) in most incarnations. Even the a-Si PV that has been around for decades
has now shifted significantly away from ITO and toward other transparent conductive oxides
(TCOs); ITO still has only about half of this market. Somewhat ironically, the TFPV technology that
uses ITO the most is actually the least commercially developed one, organic PV (OPV). But this can
be understood when one considers that OPV has had many obstacles to surmount on its path to
commercialization, such as its low conversion efficiency and its extreme sensitivity to oxygen and
moisture. An adequately performing, off-the-shelf transparent conductor allows OPV developers to
focus on other issues as they race to make OPV commercially viable. In the last few years, though,
the transparent electrodes have come back to the forefront and there have been numerous
developments in terms of substitutes for ITO in the OPV space. NanoMarkets expects OPV to use
proportionally less and less ITO as it moves toward lower costs, one of its chief objectives.
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CIGS PV Overview

CIGS PV has found itself third in line (among TFPV technologies) to high-volume
commercialization. This is not because it lacks potential—as already mentioned, it boasts the
highest champion cell conversion efficiencies of all the TFPV technologies, at 20.0 percent, and still Page | 3 

rising periodically—but rather because it has been difficult to implement in high-volume

manufacturing. Technical and operational issues prevented CIGS PV from taking off in 2007 and
2008, and the economic crisis that became evident in late 2008—reducing PV demand overall and
making investors more cautious about funding new ventures—has ensured that there will be a still-
longer wait for high-volume commercialization. Notwithstanding these difficulties, NanoMarkets still
expects CIGS PV to achieve over a gigawatt of annual production by 2014.

While CIGS PV's potential for higher conversion efficiency is the major factor keeping it in play for
the TFPV market, it is not the only one. Its performance does not degrade simply due to light or
heat exposure—as CdTe PV and a-Si PV cells do—provided that moisture is effectively excluded
from the cells. And, as a quaternary semiconductor (actually an alloy of two ternary ones: copper
indium selenide and copper gallium selenide), its composition—and bandgap—is infinitely variable
based on the relativ e amounts of indium and gallium. This could allow tuning of the bandgap to
optimize tandem cells—using CIGS for both absorber layers, dif fering only in composition—or
customization of the bandgap in single-junction cells to match different illumination conditions,
such as artificial light. CdTe and a-Si PV cells do not have this flexibility; these materials have a
fixed bandgap. Multijunction cells based on CdTe or a-Si would require completely different
materials for the additional absorbers; for instance, multijunction a-Si cells typically use Si:Ge alloy.
Finally, CIGS PV does not suffer from the stigma of incorporating toxic cadmium into cells to nearly
the extent that CdTe PV does. While it is true that most CIGS PV cells currently use cadmium in
the junction layer, this layer is diminutively thin and the quantity of cadmium used is much smaller
than that used by CdTe PV. The junction layer can even be made of a dif ferent, non-cadmium-
containing material, and at least two CIGS PV manufacturers have already eliminated cadmium
from their cells.

CIGS PV's potential for higher efficiency also influences its standing among the other TFPV
technologies in terms of the advantages shared by all of them. Flexibility and light weight are two
of the key potential performance benefits of TFPV over c-Si PV: both characteristics open the door
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to a wider range of applications and installation locations, but flexibility is also expected to permit
lower-cost manufacturing methods, such as roll-to-roll processing. The cost reductions anticipated
from such processes are a benefit even if the completed cells and modules are not intended to
bend. CIGS PV's efficiency magnifies these benefits. For instance, where weight is a concern, the
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smaller module area required for a given power output reduces CIGS PV's weight proportionally.
For flexible applications, size is also an important concern. Imagine a flexible PV power supply that
must be rolled or worn; the size of a device producing a giv en power output (or the power output
of a device of a giv en size) will be especially apparent in comparison to other, less-efficient
devices.

In its most basic construction, a CIGS PV cell must contain a CIGS absorber layer, a base
electrode, and a top electrode. If a conductiv e substrate does not serve double duty as the base
electrode as well, then a separate substrate is also needed. Currently , a separate junction layer is
used between the absorber and the top electrode; there is a possibility that new top electrode
materials may also double as the junction layer. Encapsulation is also required to protect cells from
the elements, and antireflectiv e coatings boost efficiency. Among these materials, the absorber
layer and the encapsulation materials have proven the most challenging. The absorber layer,
naturally, directly relates to indium consumption by these cells. But encapsulation materials are
also critical to the growth of CIGS PV especially for flexible applications.

As has already been mentioned, robust encapsulation is required to exclude moisture from CIGS
PV cells because their performance can degrade in the presence of moisture. Even trace amounts
of moisture can enable this degradation, so the encapsulation of the cells must be very effectiv e
indeed. Glass is a suitably impervious encapsulant, but does not address cells used in flexible
applications where glass would be too rigid. For cells sandwiched between rigid planes of glass,
sealing of the edges is not a trivial task but is still less of a problem than sealing entire surfaces
that will bend in use. Some CIGS PV manufacturers have recognized this challenge and even
turned down contracts to produce flexible cells and modules because of it. Miasolé's founder,
David Pearce, has started a new venture to develop encapsulation solutions for flexible cells.

From the perspective of the indium industry, growth in CIGS PV technology will naturally result in
growth in demand for indium. NanoMarkets expects CIGS to account for around 10 percent of the
worldwide indium market by the end of the forecast period. Other materials will be affected too;
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these include the other components of the CIGS absorber layer—copper, gallium, selenium, and (in
some cases), sulfur—as well as the intermediate products including sputtering targets, plating
baths, inks, and their components. Also included are the other materials used in CIGS PV, including
substrates, molybdenum, and transparent conductiv e oxides (TCOs) including ITO and others. In
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the case of most of these materials, CIGS PV is expected to remain a small portion of worldwide
usage, the exceptions being indium and gallium and the CIGS-specif ic intermediates.