The solar panel industry is fighting physics’ stubborn hold on the secrets of photons exciting electrons – and the results of this atomic level focus are showing up for regular people.
A trio of solar efficiency records have been brought forward recently: Hanergy’s thin film unit developed a 25% solar panel, Trina Solar broke 25% with an IBC solar cell, and a lab in Europe has set an amazing record of a 26% solar cell using a standard, simple ‘p-type’ technology.
Solar cell efficiency increases mean a lower cost for the electricity being produced because you can use much of the same hardware, and labor, to install a larger amount of energy. A few years ago, one person could easily carry a 250-280W solar panel, and today that same worker is carrying 290-325W solar panels. 16% more energy being moved with the exact same physical motions.
A key point you’ll see is that, much like the sport of professional boxing, there are many ‘record solar cell efficiencies’ because there are many product types. As such, if you get a little confused about which solar panel is the best…well, it’s a great debate in the industry among the experts – and only time will show us the winner(s).
The map below (full sized file here – pdf) gives you a taste of the many different product types and their respective efficiencies.
There are exotic solutions with crazy efficiencies – perovskite with its promise at 26.4% and, of course, multijunction products used only in space or the most demanding projects that go up to and above 45% efficiencies.
NREL Best Research Cell Efficiencies
It’s thought that a super high-efficiency bifacial, glass on glass solar panel (might be one of the reasons the bid was discarded. Sometimes you can be too cutting edge for your own good.
What’s also cool is that Solertech Universal pushing heterojunction, LG using we’re gaining longer panel lifetime as our manufacturers better their techniques.
Jinko vs LONGi
In the fall of 2017 – Jinko Solar again! I would bet that JinkoSolar made their announcement, and LONGi, knowing they had a record in the lab, jumped to respond the very next day. There’s obviously a lot of value to be had in saying your research is leading the world.
‘Lab Sized’ POLO solar cells
26.1% POLO
Much like I was excited to see the Jinko Solar and LONGi announcements, since they’re real world companies making real products in large volumes, I am most excited reading about the 26.1% efficient solar cell coming out of The Institute for Solar Energy Research Hamelin (ISFH) and The Leibniz Universität Hannover.
The key point:
“Our result demonstrates that neither n-type silicon nor boron-diffusions, nor amorphous silicon are a must for ultra-high efficiencies. There are also other attractive pathways to highest efficiencies with silicon at potentially low cost!”, states Prof. Rolf Brendel, director of ISFH.
This product is close to what is widely manufactured in the world – meaning it’s closest to you and I, and having a wide scale effect. Researchers suggested it was a relatively simple change – one machine with a different laser – to solar panel manufacturing lines that would make it possible to add these efficiency benefits. Of course, these machines don’t exist yet because these solar cells are ‘lab sized’ not ‘large area’, and it’s going to take time for this knowledge to move to manufacturing lines, however – per the researchers, it shouldn’t be a large leap. And that’s exciting.
‘IBC’ vs ‘Standard’ solar cell
25.05% IBC
Trina Solar has set a new record of 25.04% total-area efficiency for a large-area n-type mono-crystalline silicon Interdigitated Back Contact (IBC) solar cell.
But wait – this solar cell size themselves per this conversation on Twitter with Mark Osborne (the person I get most of my upstream solar manufacturer knowledge from), thus the large-area denotation. Plus, this could very well be an ‘in China’ record per Mark, we’ll find out after the Chinese New Year (happy New Year, China!).
second largest solar panel manufacturer on that very same planet, is the company to bring this technology to the masses, we all win.
Hanergy ‘Thin Film’ solar cell
25.1% solar PANEL (not solar cell)
dual junction solar cell that peaks at 29% (PDF)!! The challenge with this product is scale/price as of right now – but holy heck – a 25% efficient, sorta normal solar panel is in the world.
Electrek’s Take
Scientific research has a real affect on your and my life, and this field of research driving clean energy production is going to save billions of human lives. Advances in medicine and food production have allowed humanity to absolutely dominate the surface of this rock. Cleaning our energy will allow us some serious time to figure out how to integrate, feed, educate and manage the next 7.3 billion of us.
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