The China-based PV manufacturing industry has been in a massive capacity expansion phase since 2019. This intensified in the first quarter of 2020 but had eased off through the year, but the cumulative figures are jaw dropping, which has led to real fears of overcapacity in 2021.
Joe Biden’s victory in November’s US election may have taken some time to certify, but there’s every chance his tenure in the White House will be worth the wait for US solar. Molly Lempriere looks at what a Biden administration will do for the industry.
Despite its generation characteristics, floating solar has yet to truly fulfil its undoubted potential. Jules Scully explores why the technology continues to face hurdles, and what the industry is doing to surpass them.
While COVID-19 may have dominated headlines internationally this year, 2020 has been a year of considerable progress for the global solar supply chain. Here, the PV Tech editorial team re-cap some of the biggest and most impactful stories of the year.
This paper presents preliminary results of SERIS’ biPolyTM cell: the bifacial application of polysiliconbased passivating contact stacks with front and rear screen-printed and fired metallization.
This work reports the latest results obtained at Jolywood for full-area (251.99cm2) n-type bifacial passivating-contact solar cells using a cost-effective process with industrially-feasible boron diffusion, phosphorus ion implantation and low-pressure chemical vapour deposition (LPCVD) with in situ oxidation.
This paper reviews the key technology improvements which have enabled a continuous 0.5%abs/year increase in efficiency of industrial PERC and PERC+ cells.
This paper provides a concise overview of existing c-Si-based 2-, 3- and 4-terminal tandem technologies, summarizes the current development status, and sets out the future roadmap. In addition, a discussion is included of what will be required over the coming years to bring these promising technologies to market, enabling commercial efficiencies above 30%.
This paper discusses, at both the cell and the module level, the balance between the advantages and drawbacks of increasing the cell bifaciality from a typical value of 90% towards 100%, or decreasing it towards that of monofacial cells (0%).
Because it leads to higher efficiencies than aluminium back-surface field (Al-BSF) cells, passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC) technology is attracting more and more attention in the industry and gaining market share. However, PERC technology brings new challenges with regard to the phenomenon of degradation: some monofacial/bifacial PERC cell modules were found to demonstrate much higher power degradation than Al-BSF cell modules after damp-heat (DH: 85°C and 85% relative humidity RH, 1000h) and potential-induced degradation (PID: 85°C and 85% RH, –1,500V, 96h) tests, which will be the focus of this paper.
