Roadmap Seeks US CdTe Thin‑Film Scale‑Up to 100 GW/yr by 2030

A coalition of university, national‑lab and industry partners has published a technical roadmap that maps a feasible pathway for the United States to manufacture on the order of 100 GWDC of cadmium‑telluride (CdTe) thin‑film solar modules annually by 2030. The document frames the ambition around two tight constraints: the available tellurium feedstock and the module conversion efficiency required to make thin‑film competitive at very large volumes. On the materials side the authors point to incremental gains in tellurium recovery from existing copper refining streams as a practical lever to expand supply without creating new mines. On the device side, recent progress replacing conventional copper doping with group‑V element dopants has unlocked higher open‑circuit voltages and a step‑change in certified cell efficiencies, with a leading manufacturer reporting a verified cell result above 23 percent. The roadmap treats these technical advances and supply improvements as complementary: higher efficiencies reduce per‑watt tellurium demand and improve the economics of domestic production. The paper also catalogues manufacturing bottlenecks, workforce needs and regulatory considerations that accompany rapid capacity expansion, and it places established industrial actors—most notably an Ohio‑origin company that remains the largest CdTe producer—at the center of near‑term scale‑up plans. Recent capital deployments illustrate the commercial response: a new U.S. factory opened with more than $1 billion in investment and multiple gigawatts of nameplate capacity, and a separate project will add several additional gigawatts to domestic output, pushing that firm’s American annual nominal output toward the high‑teens of gigawatts within two years. The authors argue that coordinated policy, targeted R&D on extraction and refining, and continued adoption of the new doping pathway are the minimum conditions needed to realize the 2030 target. They caution that demand-side questions remain unresolved: locating the offtake to absorb rapidly rising domestic module supply will be a parallel challenge for utilities, developers and federal procurement. If these technical and market pieces align, the United States could diversify its solar supply chain, accelerate utility‑scale deployment, and create manufacturing jobs; if they do not, the country risks stranded capacity and pressure on critical mineral markets. The roadmap therefore reads as both a technical blueprint and an industrial call to action, asking public and private stakeholders to synchronize investment, policy and materials‑processing improvements to avoid chokepoints. Implementation will require ongoing monitoring of tellurium availability, cell efficiency trajectories, and factory ramp rates to ensure targets remain realistic as commercial realities evolve.