PV Tech Premium spoke with Cypress Creek Renewable Energy and AES Clean Energy to discuss the newly formed US Solar Buyer Consortium, its objectives, market challenges and the potential advantages it holds for US manufacturing and project development.
US authorities’ move to require documentation showing the source of quartzite in solar module imports should come as no surprise, experts have said, amid suggestions most companies will be able to overcome the latest hurdle that threatens to delay shipments.
Solar and energy storage were described by Elon Musk as going together “like peanut butter and jelly”. Andy Colthorpe meets some of the players creating this winning combination in the US.
Australia’s solar sector is poised to accelerate deployment as the country’s new government vows to unlock renewables investment, upgrade the grid and bring federal policy more in line with states and territories.
The race for green hydrogen dominance is on, with global markets ramping up the scale of their ambition in terms of deployment. But this too is causing a further fight for market share among the three core electrolysis technologies, as Jonathan Tourino Jacobo learns.
Two-terminal tandem solar cells based on perovskite/silicon (PK/ Si) technology represent one of the most exciting pathways towards pushing solar cell efficiencies beyond the thermodynamic limit of single-junction crystalline silicon devices. While laboratory efficiencies of these tandem cells have risen to very impressive levels, many important innovations towards enabling their eventual manufacturability have also been made in this rapidly evolving field. In this paper, a number of these processing innovations are highlighted in order to give a more complete view as to the viability of scaling up the processing of these devices. Specifically, the focus is placed on how today’s crystalline silicon process flows could be adapted in order to allow existing cell lines to produce PK/Si cells.
This paper presents a way to evaluate production windows and related field issues using an adapted failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) approach. Since PV modules are the most important component in terms of longevity and warranties, the focus of Fraunhofer’s work has been on module manufacturing. The process, however, can also be applied to cell manufacturing and other steps in the value chain.
Low-temperature interconnection processes for high-efficiency PV cells will be a key R&D topic in the coming years. In reality, to avoid significant deterioration of the surface passivation, the metallization and interconnection processes of silicon heterojunction (SHJ) cells are limited to temperatures below 200°C; tandem cells with a perovskite subcell demand an even greater reduction in process temperature, namely below 130°C. Moreover, to ensure the sustainability of PV production on a TW scale, the use of scarce materials, especially silver, needs to be reduced, as 10% of the world’s supply was already dedicated to PV in 2020. This paper addresses the results obtained in terms of reducing the silver consumption in interconnection technology based on electrical conductive adhesive (ECA) and Pb-free ribbons.
After several years of technological developments, measurement and quality standard specifications, and bifaciality implementations in energy yield simulation programs, bifacial PV has become reliable and will shortly become accepted as a valuable commodity. Since 2020, bifacial passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC) technology has been king of the energy markets, and, in combination with simple tracking systems (e.g. horizontal single-axis tracking – HSAT), the lowest electricity costs have been achieved. Because PERC is reaching its limit in terms of efficiency, and n-type technology is gaining momentum, in the future n-type PV (nPV) will replace PERC technology as the workhorse of the PV electricity market. This paper describes why, and most likely when, this will happen and which n-type technologies will be leading the pack in the race to bring electricity costs well below €0.01/kWh.
