Programs and Events

Dr. Timothy J. Coutts made a presentation on “Thin-Film Solar Cells: Successes and Challenges”

October 25, 2006

 

Dr Coutts during his presentation at the U.S. Embassy in Wellington. Larger photo.

Timothy Coutts is a Research Fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and works in the National Center for Photovoltaics.  He has interests in several technologies related to solar energy conversion and energy efficiency. 

In his talk at the U.S. Embassy in Wellington, Dr Coutts gave a brief overview of renewable energy research being conducted at NREL, and concluded with several examples of recent commercial products along with future goals and directions for the technology. He discussed the possible role of thin-film solar cells in the energy field in the United States.

World production of solar cells has increased rapidly in the last few years with a growth rate of approximately 35% per year. Individual states in the USA are introducing initiatives that will, if successful, lead to a significant proportion of their electricity demand being met by solar cells within the first two or three decades of this century.

During his presentation Dr Coutt's briefly mentioned the President’s recently-introduced Solar America Initiative and its likely impact and discussed the rate of production in the USA in comparison with that in other countries, Japan and Germany in particular.  He talked about some of the physical principles underlying the operation of solar cells and related these to the three main types of thin-film devices and the remarkable advances that have been made, and the challenges that have yet to be met.

Dr Coutts has been involved in thin-film physics concerned with charge transfer in thin copper films (PhD), thin-film strain gauges, charge transfer in discontinuous thin-films, surface scattering in thin-metal films, characterization of the properties of high-performance transparent conducting oxides, charge scattering characterization in TCOs using the 4-coefficient method, as well as optical modeling. He has several patents and is a prolific writer.

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