Huasun Energy Co., Ltd of China has officially commissioned its 500 MW heterojunction (HJT) cell-module production capacity calling it the ‘world’s 1st low-cost intelligent mass-produced HJT project’. 
Construction on this line started on November 11, 2020 in Anhui province and it was officially put into production on March 18, 2021.  
What’s interesting is that the company has reported average power conversion efficiency of HJT cells on this mass production line as 23.8%, with the highest efficiency of 24.39%. The Chinese company’s CTO Wang Wenjing argued that there is scope for the average conversion efficiency in mass production to reach 24.3% and that it is just round the corner.  
We had a production ramp plan before, but in fact, during the trial production, the conversion efficiency of our first furnace reached 23.2%, and the second furnace continued to increase to 23.8%, and the third furnace reached 24.39%, which is equivalent to one month to one and a half months earlier than the original plan, far exceeding previous expectations,” claims Xu Xin who was responsible for the cell project. 
The Chinese manufacturer has used YAC’s cleaning and texturing equipment, PECVD equipment from Maxwell and Ideal Energy, PVD equipment from Maxwell, and screen printing equipment from Maxwell and Zonchow.
The management shared that Huasun will use the latest high precision soldering and introduce silver-clad copper paste to ‘greatly reduce’ the cost of HJT technology. It further added, “The gap between cell unit silver consumption will sharply narrow from around 100% in 2020 to less than 20%, and there is still room for further decline in the future, close to or even lower than PERC silver consumption, truly opening the era of low-cost mass production of HJT technology.”
Huasun expects the line to reach its full production capacity at the end of June 2021, following which it said it will immediately start expansion of 2 GW HJT cell+module project in H2/2021 to offer HJT products with higher efficiency and higher power output per W. 
TaiyangNews delved deep into the HJT technology in our Heterojunction Solar Technology 2020 Report, launched during our High Efficiency Solar Technologies Conference in December 2020. The report can be downloaded for free here.