heterojunction

In recent months, China’s Risen Energy has posted impressive module efficiencies, closing in on 24%, with its hyper-ion series. The company will ramp up to large-scale production of these heterojunction products in the first half of 2023, and pv magazine recently caught up with Risen Energy’s Chief Information Officer Terry Wu to discuss this, as well as the company’s work on energy storage projects.

Clean Energy Associates (CEA) has calculated the price premium that solar developers will swallow in return for the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) savings offered by the latest generation of high-efficiency PV panels.

New research from UNSW in Australia outlines the need for solar cell and module makers to reduce or eliminate the use of silver in their products. Based on expected PV growth, in line with climate change commitments, solar manufacturers would require at least 85% of global silver reserves, according to the new study.

Hopefuls from 40 different countries submitted entries to the pv magazine Awards in 2022, with more regions represented than ever before. This reflects the industry’s increasing global relevance and the importance all regions are placing on local innovation and production. Here we present the seven winners, who will be honored once again in a live Award ceremony on Jan. 17th, staged alongside the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi and as part of the 11th MESIA Solar Awards Ceremony.

The new product is available in five versions with a power output of 380 W to 400 W and a power conversion efficiency ranging from 20.86% to 21.96%. It also features a temperature coefficient of -0.26% per C.

Switzerland’s Meyer Burger is accelerating the expansion of its solar panel production capacity, following the extension of the US solar tax credit for PV manufacturers and an order from developer DE Shaw for 3.75 GW of US-made heterojunction modules.

In a study that began in 2016, US scientists purchased 834 PV modules, representing seven manufacturers and 13 module types, and installed them in various climate conditions to observe their performance over time. The results show that, while plenty of opportunities still exist to extend module lifetimes and reduce performance loss in the field, reductions in the manufacturing cost of PV have not come with an increase in their degradation rate.

Scientists at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) have investigated gallium-doping in p-type silicon wafers as a route to better performance. Testing these specially produced p-type wafers in TOPCon and heterojunction cell architectures, which several major PV cell manufacturers are gearing up to produce on more expensive n-type wafers, the scientists found that with gallium doping, the p-type wafers can achieve similar or even better cell efficiencies compared to those made so far with n-type wafers.

REC Solar has announced plans for a PV module gigafactory in France, along with 17 other clean tech projects that will share €1.8 billion ($1.8 billion) of grants from the European Union’s Innovation Fund.

US scientists have tested a range of modern cell designs under strong ultraviolet light and have found that many of them, including p-type PERC and n-type heterojunction cells, are more susceptible to degradation than older back surface field designs. They noted that the rear side of bifacial cells may be particularly vulnerable.