First Solar has said that it has contacted Abound Solar's trustees to begin discussions whether it can recover materials from up to 100,000 panels made by the bankrupt cadmium telluride (CdTe) module manufacturer.
New R&D test cells produced at First Solar’s Perrysburg, Ohio factory and R&D centre have reached a new record cell conversion efficiency of 18.7%. The record was verified by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and announced by First Solar yesterday.
Solar Frontier strengthened its position as the closest thin-film PV module manufacturer competitor to First Solar in 2012, posting record revenue of US$833 million (JPY78.2 billion).
The Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and Morocco’s Research Institute of Solar Energy and New Energy (IRESEN) have announced a collaboration on thin-film research.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology yesterday announced it has achieved a conversion efficiency of 10.7% for a single-junction microcrystalline silicon thin-film solar cell.
CIGS thin-film module manufacturer, TSMC Solar has boosted its champion module efficiencies to 15.1%, a 0.9% increase barely five-months after reporting efficiencies of 14.2% in September, 2012.
Scientists at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, have developed thin-film solar cells on flexible polymer foils with a new record efficiency of 20.4% for converting sunlight into electricity.