With a volatile energy market and a fast-expanding solar sector, there are plenty of topics for the industry to stay on top of. Intersolar Europe will explore a number of issues aimed at helping the
industry find new business opportunities and understand key market trends. PV Tech Power looks at three of these in more detail
Future solar finance | Ahead of the Solar Finance & Investment Asia Conference in Singapore, Dr M. Rusydi of SGI Mitabu tells John Parnell how solar could tap into the potentially enormous investment opportunities offered by Islamic finance.
PV waste | Europe is leading the way in efforts to regulate the disposal and recycling of old or discarded PV modules. Sara Ver-Bruggen investigates the extent to which the industry is complying with the rules and whether PV markets in other parts of the world are likely to follow Europe’s lead.
As the upstream PV industry enters a new phase of growth, manufacturers are seeking new strategies and technologies to enable them to continue to cut costs and remain competitive. The sixth edition of the annual International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaic describes the key trends likely to shape the PV sector in the coming year. This paper analyses some of the most promising areas for development.
Poor insulation resistance in modules is one of the primary contributors to module failure. Regimes currently in place to test the insulation resistance of crystalline silicon modules have proved problematic, as the conditions found in a laboratory are not on a par with environmental conditions at installation sites. This paper explores the shortcomings of current testing standards and recommends further tests that should be introduced to prevent module failures in the field.
Post-subsidy solar | Europe’s solar market has been characterised by peaks and troughs and a good deal of pain for its industry in the process. Although the continent is not expected to see a return to
anything like the explosive growth it saw up until 2012, steady forecasts for the coming years hint at solid, sustained expansion. John Parnell reports.
High-efficiency (HE) PV technologies, such as heterojunction, back-contact or n-type, can be affected by significant measurement errors compared with conventional technologies; the power measurement of HE crystalline silicon PV modules and cells has therefore been a challenge for the PV industry for at least two decades. To deal with the internal capacitance and the spectral mismatch errors of HE cells and modules, various measurement techniques are currently used: steady-state, multi-flash, dynamic I–V, DragonBack™ and dark I–V and reconstruction methods, to name a few. This paper discusses the challenges and provides guidance for best practice for acquiring accurate measurements.
Conference report | In April, the deployment of solar in West Africa came under the spotlight during a two-day event in Accra, Ghana. Reporting on the event, Ben Willis heard huge excitement over
the prospects for solar in the region tempered by the realities of scaling up a new technology in a challenging part of the world.
Emerging markets | Mexico remains a market of undoubted potential, but there’s a growing opinion that it will struggle to live up to its hype amid regulatory uncertainty. Liam Stoker asks if last year’s
sweeping energy reforms will continue to hold the market back, or result in a solar explosion by 2018.
Potential-induced degradation (PID) of the shunting type (PID-s) is one of the most severe forms of PID, which is caused by the negative potential of p-type solar cells with respect to grounded frames/mounting. Although this negative potential can be completely avoided at the system level, that is not the case for a large number of modern PV systems. PV modules that are able to sustain PID-s stress for at least the duration of their service life are therefore essential. To assess whether modules fulfil this requirement, laboratory tests are currently recommended in which the modules are exposed to a certain constant level of PID-s stress for a given amount of time. These types of test with constant stress levels, however, are only feasible in the case of degradation mechanisms that are not reversible in the field, for which non-coherent stress episodes simply sum up to the total stress. Unlike other mechanisms, PID-s is reversible under field conditions; as a consequence, the level of PID-s of a fielded module is the result of an intricate interplay of phases of degradation and regeneration. This behaviour cannot be replicated in a laboratory test using a constant stress level; the currently recommended laboratory tests for PID-s with constant stress levels are therefore not appropriate for assessing the service life duration, and can only be used for differentiating the susceptibility to PID-s stress and for monitoring the stability of production processes. For monitoring the PID-s resistance of its products, Hanwha Q CELLS uses tests for PID-s with constant stress in accordance with the draft for IEC PID test method 62804. This assures that all the products of the Q CELLS brand come with Anti-PID Technology (APT). The expected service life duration with respect to PID-s is assessed by simulating the interplay of degradation and regeneration under non-constant outdoor conditions that are based on meteorological data.
