Dear (n)PV-community,
The deployment of photovoltaic technology in the energy sector is truly accelerating. Owing to a bitter/sweet historical combination of energy crisis because of the war in Ukraine (bad!) and record low production costs of silicon-based PV modules (good!), many industrial initiatives at national level are being reported – each of them in the range of several GW as production capacity! This is amazing, if we want to witness a growth of the PV market which is sustainable also geographically.
Though we follow with interest the positioning of governments in supporting local PV production, our scientific and technical focus is providing industry with cost-effective, sustainable, and high-efficiency c-Si architectures that can replace PERC in the short-/mid-term. In both front/back-contacted and interdigitated back-contacted variants, TOPCon/POLO and HJT architectures have all reached conversion efficiencies above 26% on large area wafers. Those values give us confidence that the technology is there, but much effort must be channeled on increasing module efficiency to beyond 24% while quenching CAPEX and usage of scarce materials.
All that is easier said than done, but the ingenuity, drive and installed base production capacity of our nPV community is second to none. In the upcoming nPV workshop we shall present our long-awaited nPV book, which addresses state-of-the-art and innovations of the whole nPV value chain. In addition, we shall touch upon the industrialization of tandems, low-cost and new manufacturing tools, modelling and data processing, reliability and energy yield, sustainability and much more. Together with our long-term industrial and scientific partners, I kindly invite you all to attend the nPV workshop.
I look forward to welcoming you all in Delft in April 2023!
Olindo
