Proceedings of MATSUS Spring 2025 Conference (MATSUSSpring25)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.matsusspring.2025.344
Publication date: 16th December 2024
Mitigating climate change is the most urgent driver for the expansion of photovoltaics to multi-terawatt scale. Yet, to address the challenges of the Anthropocene, PV technologies need to address sustainability challenges even more holistically, which necessitates four transformative actions. We will discuss to which degree this can be achieved by state-of-the-art wafer-based single-junction PV technologies and which potential lies in future solar cell architectures. To achieve this, we propose the framework of “maximum sustainable yield for technologies” as a guideline for sustainable energy research and development in the 21st century.