International Summit Works Toward Establishing Measurement Standards for Organic Solar Cell Technology

The first International Summit on Organic Photovoltaic Stability (ISOS) was recently co-hosted by the Department of Energy (DOE), its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Plextronics, Inc. in Golden, Colorado. The findings from that summit were then presented at the SPIE Optics + Photonics conference in San Diego.

The goal of the international summit  — which had more than 50 attendees from six countries representing the OPV leaders in industry, academia and national labs — was to help focus international attention and efforts on the most important issues related to organic photovoltaic (OPV) stability, especially those that are relevant to general measurement practices. It also gathered the international OPV community to begin to establish a set of accepted procedures to quantify degradation such that data could be more easily understood between organizations.

“From our perspective, instituting a standard for lifetime testing is vital to the commercialization of OPV technology, and we are partnering with global organizations to make that happen,” said Andy Hannah, CEO of Plextronics. “We are in an emerging and rapidly growing industry, and the best way to maintain the credibility of organic photovoltaics and move the technology forward is to ensure that we are not only sharing information, but also comparing similar results for efficiency achievements, lifetime goals and other important variables.”

“We believe the conference was a critical step in the development of a common language and approach in the OPV community,” said NREL Research Fellow David Ginley.  “It started the process of defining the standards and goals for OPV worldwide.  We are excited about the high level of worldwide collaboration in this area and look forward its continued evolution.”

During breakout sessions at the Summit, the participants advanced the discussion on stability and measurement. A draft of recommended testing practices for OPV stability was created to help unify the efforts of the research and commercial development communities, and a framework was defined to begin round robin testing for efficiency standardization. Changes to the DOE National Technology Roadmap for OPV, facilitated by NREL, were also proposed to align these recommendations with OPV performance goals.