SPONSORED: Falling system prices have been a key driver of PV's recent growth and competitiveness, but upfront costs are only one part of the equation for long-term profitability within the solar power industry. Maximising any given system’s cumulative power output over its lifetime is critical to lowering the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) and maximising investment returns.
SPONSORED: Black Silicon offers the solar industry a bright future. Advanced Silicon Group's co-founders Marcie R. Black and William B. Rever, III offer some of their experiences after a decade of research on a material only now being produced at scale.
Today, silicon solar cells are still produced in almost equal shares from mono- and multi-crystalline silicon wafers. The authors here look at the scope for efficiencies in the wire sawing process for multi-crystalline silicon.
US-based wafer producer 1366 Technologies and ‘Silicon Module Super League’ (SMSL) member Hanwha Q CELLS have announced a new cells record of 20.3% using direct wafer technology.
DuPont, an industry leader in high-performance materials for photovoltaic panels, shares best practices for solar array design, component selection and long-term maintenance.
DuPont, an industry leader in high-performance materials for photovoltaic panels, shares Bill of Materials (BoM) specification recommendations based on extensive field observations and laboratory testing.
With the transition of the cell structure from aluminium back-surface field (Al-BSF) to passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC), the efficiency of multicrystalline silicon solar cells becomes more and more sensitive to variations in electrical material quality. Moreover, the variety of multicrystalline materials has increased with the introduction of high-performance multicrystalline silicon. For these reasons, a reliable and verifiable assessment of the electrical material quality of multicrystalline wafers gains importance: to this end, a rating procedure based on photoluminescence imaging has been developed.
