passivated emitter rear contact

The debate continues over whether super-sized, high-power solar modules are a good thing for the industry and they appear to be here to stay. Vicente Parra and James Whittemore, from Enertis Applus+, consider the pitfalls to avoid when designing high-power solar 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.

The search for ever higher conversion efficiency has driven solar researchers to focus on back-contact cell approaches, and efforts to devise more cost-effective manufacturing are bringing technologies such as interdigitated back contact (IBC) solar into the mainstream, as Mark Hutchins reports.

Solar module prices continued to fall in January, and there is no end in sight. The main drivers impacting prices are lower shipping rates from China and the further recovery of the euro-US dollar exchange rate. Martin Schachinger, of pvXchange, expects other effects, such as slowly falling energy costs or polysilicon and wafer prices – which are in freefall – to further strengthen the trend in the coming months.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has opened a new door for US solar manufacturers, as one of the executives behind a US-Jordanian project to bring PV production to the US explains.

The SOL 7 series comprises five products for Perc, Topcon and heterojunction devices.

The Chinese manufacturer said the result was confirmed by Germany’s TÜV Rheinland. The achievement beats the company’s previous record of 21.65%, set last month.

As it moves towards grid connection this month, the solar project in the south of Oman demonstrates the value proposition of n-type PV cell technology, Chinese solar manufacturer Jolywood has argued at the World Future Energy Summit. The project is said to be the largest n-type bifacial array in the world.

In a white paper published this week, Chinese module maker Longi Solar shares six months of data from a testing site in India that was built in cooperation with German testing institute TÜV Rheinland. The results show energy yield gains of around 20% for both bifacial mono PERC and n-type modules.

A new test design from the University of Central Florida has challenged modules with different cell technologies. The results show advantages for the heterojunction modules tested. Here we discuss the new method with its designer.