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The article presents the author's opinion on five selected technical reports which were discussed at the Photovoltaic Technical Conference held in Provence, France in 2011. These papers reportedly tackles low cost photovoltaic solutions to address the grid parity objectives crucial for competitive electricity produced by renewable energy sources. She comments that the solutions presented are key factors in the success of future photovoltaic technologies for consumer production of electricity.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including low-cost photovoltaic solutions, enhancing photovoltaic efficiency, and critical grid parity needed for competitive electricity.

The integration of photovoltaic (PV) elements in urban environments is gaining visibility due to the current interest in developing energetically self-sustainable buildings. Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) may be seen as a solution to convert urban elements, such as façades and windows, into energy-generation units for zero-energy buildings. Moreover, LSCs are able to reduce the mismatch between the AM1.5G spectrum and the PV cells absorption. In this work, we report optically active coatings for LSCs based on lanthanide ions (Ln3+ = Eu3+, Tb3+)-doped surface functionalized ionosilicas (ISs) embedded in poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA). These new visible-emitting films exhibit large Stokes-shift, enabling the production of transparent coatings with negligible self-absorption and large molar extinction coefficient and brightness values (~2 × 105 and ~104 M−1∙cm−1, respectively) analogous to that of orange/red-emitting organic dyes. LSCs showed great potential for efficient and environmentally resistant devices, with optical conversion efficiency values of ~0.27% and ~0.34%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]