Crystalline Silicon or Cadmium Telluride Modules?

With nearly a 95% market share for crystalline silicon solar panels, it's easy to overlook other types of technologies.

However, there is a wide variety of solar cell technologies. Among them, you can find cadmium telluride (CdTe) technology, the most popular within the group of thin-film technologies. The manufacturing process is based on methods called deposition techniques.

This technology offers several advantages over crystalline silicon:

• ✅ Low manufacturing cost.
• ✅ Better response to high temperatures.
• ✅ Low degradation percentage.
• ✅ High absorption: Cadmium telluride is a material with a bandgap energy that can be adjusted from 1.4 to 1.5 (eV), allowing the theoretical efficiency limit of this technology to be higher than that of silicon. ✅ Cadmium is obtained as a byproduct of zinc, lead, and copper smelting, so its production does not depend on the PV market demand, and it also helps prevent this metal from being disposed of in landfills.

And, of course, there are also some disadvantages:

• ❌ The materials are toxic, so special attention must be paid to recycling these modules at the end of their useful life.
• ❌ Currently, the efficiency achieved with this technology is lower than that of technologies like crystalline silicon.

In this graph published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, you can observe the evolution of efficiencies achieved for different technologies from 1976 to the present day. It can be seen how cadmium telluride technology has significantly increased its efficiency in recent years.