Superior stability of ultra thin CdTe solar cells with simple Cu/Au back contact

Due to its high scalability and low production cost, CdTe has shown a significant potential for high mass production, resulting to be one of the cheapest photovoltaic technologies available. Efficiencies exceeding 20% have been obtained by the application of high temperature CdTe deposition. However tellurium scarcity is a limitation for mass production and one of the possibilities to overcome this is the reduction of absorber thickness. We have already demonstrated efficiencies above 11% for devices with 1.5 μm thick CdTe. Nowadays we have fabricated ultra-thin absorber devices performing more than 13% efficiencies. But what is most interesting is that we have observed a different electrical operation and stability, connected to the fact that the depletion region takes a very large part of the device. In this work many CdTe solar cells with a standard Cu/Au back contact, made with different absorber thicknesses, were prepared, stored in dark and tested at different aging times, showing different reactions to the aging and in particular a remarkable stability as CdTe thickness reduces. - Highlights: • CdTe/CdS devices with 0.7, 1 and 1.8 μm thick absorbers have been prepared. • Superior stability in dark aging of ultra thin CdTe devices has been registered. • Electrical analysis shows different behaviors and nature of defects for thin CdTe samples. • For 6 μm CdTe samples degradation is driven mainly by defect compensation. • For ultra thin CdTe samples, degradation is dominated by impurities from the front contact