It didn't take long after commercialization of PERC solar technology had really started: Last year, we entered the PERC era in the solar cell technologies segment. And today, PERC is the new standard – at least for monocrystalline cells, which is on its way to becoming the leading crystalline cell species.
While cell manufacturers continue to expand into standard PERC, several stakeholders involved in solar cell production are offering and working on processes and materials to bring PERC to the next level. That's why our PERC 2018 report is looking at PERC+, that's for us everything supporting basic PERC to improve efficiency and yield – from selective emitters to bifacial technology. As many researchers and companies are also looking into cell technologies that could compete with PERC today or succeed it tomorrow, we are briefly analyzing these candidates as well.
PERC is high on the hit list of record efficiencies. In the last 12 months, the world record was broken 6 times. Today's highest efficiency PERC cell of 23.95% was made by JinkoSolar, followed by a 23.6% cell from LONGi.
When it comes to production of PERC panels, the general metric is rather module power than cell efficiency. And several advancements in module design are pushing the module power rating upwards. More busbars, multi busbars and half cut cells are increasingly adapted for PERC modules. We have summarized the top PERC module efficiencies from leading module manufacturers.
PERC has improved significantly since it entered mass production 6 years ago. We have taken a look at PERC developments and incremental changes to improve the technology.
PERC has many opportunities to be tweaked to the PERC+ level. Examples for PERC+ are bifacial PERC, black silicon texturing and a PERCT structure. But no technology will last forever. Thus we have briefly looked at possible candidates to replace PERC. This includes n-PERT, n-PERL, passivated contacts and heterojunction technology
With metallization pastes playing a key role for solar cells in general and PERC in particular, we have interviewed executives from a global market leader and pioneer in this field (DuPont) and a rising star from China (DKEM).
PERC 2018 Report in detail:
After an introduction (1) and overviewon basics and processing background of PERC solar cells (2), we provide details on how to manufacture PERCcells, including product news and key suppliers (from deposition and lasers to rear polishing and metallization) (3). PERC's performance summarizes the latest efficiency updates (4), while the PERC productionchapter incudes data for the top products of the largest module suppliers and an estimate of global PERC production capacities (5). We discuss the latest PERC improvements(6), further development methods towards PERC+(7) and what's the alternatives to PERC in the PERC Beyondchapter (8). Following the conclusions (9), we include two Q&As with executives from DuPontand DKEM (10).
You can download the TaiyangNews PERC Report 2018 for free here.