How far can the solar PV technology go as PERC is near its upper-efficiency limit? Several recent studies throw some light on this issue. The most recent shares the view that now the industry has invested in a transition to N-Type technology, this provides a path for manufacturers for incremental improvements to values of cell efficiency over 24% value demonstrated in the pilot production line.
To enable to move past the 25% cell energy conversion efficiency in production, commercially feasible N-type TOPCon sequences are being increasingly brought online. This displacement of the PERC approach is expected to continue, with no new capacity expected to be added after 2021. Most new photovoltaic manufacturing capacity added in the second half of 2021 was N-Type TOPCon based, making TOPCon the cell technology with the second-highest production capacity in 2022, with the latest industry roadmap anticipating N-type TOPCon will become the dominant commercial cell technology by 2023.
N-type particularly TOPCon will account for the majority of new additions by the second half of 2022. Take Jinkosolar for example, its N-type TOPCon has gone into production, reaching the capacity of 10GW in Q1 2022 with average cell efficiency above 24.5% and the best cell can reach greater than 25%. PV Infolink reported on the rapid rate of adoption of N-type TOPCon into manufacturing with 40 GW capacity conservatively estimated worldwide by end of 2022. The rapid growth of N-type TOPCon production capacity in 2022 made it after the PERC technology, the cell technology with the second-highest established production capacity by year-end.
With ongoing streamlining and standardization of N-type TOPCon sequences, the processing cost premium/cell relative to PERC devices is expected to reduce. At the same time, the performance advantage over PERC cells might be expected to increase as the higher bifacial factor, lower temperature coefficient, much lower LeTID, long term degradation of the TOPCon approach are fully exploited.
