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Among the most interesting renewable energies, solar energy is very well suited to respond to the increasing necessities of the humanity.Solar light constitutes an inexhaustible energy source: the Earth receives from the sun in one hour and a half, the energy to cover the humanity needs during one year.But, the future deployment of the photovoltaic technology is compromised by both, the development of cost-effective processes as well as earth abundant and low toxic materials, without scarifying the devices efficiency.In this framework, enormous efforts have been done in the last years for the development of chemical based routes applied to the mass production of thin film photovoltaic technology, which are in turns less expensive than classical vapor phase ones, but that gencrally leads to lower efficiency devices.Additionally, two of the most mature technologies in the thin films photovoltaic field (CdTe and CIGS) have the problem of the scarcity and/or high toxicity of its constituent elements.In this presentation, a review of the last advances on the low-cost thin films photovoltaic technology will be presented, focusing on the discussion of the key advantages and drawbacks of the chemical/electrochemical routes, and it future challenges and perspectives to replace more expensive vapor phase techniques.In addition, new earth abundant and low toxicity chalcogenide materials will be presented, which are today the best suited materials to answer to the increasing demand of solar energy.