Technical Papers

Not only will solar be the dominant source of new power generation in Europe by 2025, cementing its position as the third largest market for solar globally, but the continent has placed the asset class at the very heart of its COVID-19 recovery strategy. Liam Stoker, Edith Hancock and Jules Scully explore the drivers for solar in Europe, the key markets and the challenges that remain.

The holy grail of every solar cell producer is the creation of a lowcost interdigitated back-contact (IBC) solar cell with an efficiency greater than 25%, a goal that can be found in almost every roadmap presentation. In this paper it will be shown that we are not far away from achieving this target, since IBC devices, with different process complexities, are already in production at several companies.

This paper will accordingly outline the recent activities at CEA-INES concerning the development and understanding of the integration of such shingle cells.

In this paper, an even greater reduction in wafer thickness, down to 130μm, is evaluated, and the critical steps in terms of breakage rates in cell and module production processes are reviewed. Finally, the mechanical stability and reliability of these thin HJT cells in glass–backsheet and glass–glass module types are addressed.

This paper provides a short overview of historical developments, presents the main approaches in mass production today, discusses potential process simplifications, and briefly touches upon a key topic for the future, namely reducing the silver (Ag) consumption per cell.

This paper discusses what approaches from the digitalization field can be used quickly and easily to accelerate ramp-up, to analyse overlapping data and to improve production either manually or automatically.

To embrace the terawatt-scale challenge of the PV market growth, a low-carbon and resource-efficient pathway has to be guaranteed. An approach for doing this is to enable market mechanisms that account for the greenhouse gases emissions, and their associated costs, from PV systems and components.

Software is rapidly becoming recognised as key to the value proposition and bankability of energy storage, which in turn lies at the heart of the low carbon energy transition. Andy Colthorpe speaks to three providers of software aimed at the energy storage industry.

With a project pipeline in excess of 14GW, a developing regulatory envelope and maturing revenue streams, the UK’s energy storage sector continues to be at the forefront globally. Molly Lempriere charts the market’s development to date and uncovers how it has responded to deployment barriers.

Using abundant resources for components and as ‘fuel’, zinc batteries can be a cost-effective, flexible and scalable technology to deliver many of the needs of a resilient, low-carbon energy system, says Ron MacDonald at Zinc8.