The Photovoltaic Module Reliability Conference, hosted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the United States, discussed how long the PV modules lasted and which factors affected their life. Perhaps some people do not care, feel that reliability does not affect the current business, this view is actually wrong.
CIGS's commitment
CIGS has the advantages of low cost and deposition on flexible substrates. Recently, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and SunShot have already had a plan to reduce the cost of photovoltaic systems by 75% to around US$1 per watt. At present, flexible CIGS photovoltaic modules can provide mass production to DOE level. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory NREL claims that the use of flexible PV modules instead of traditional glass substrates can reduce mass production costs to $0,17-0,94 per watt.
Find out the problem
The reliability problem of high-efficiency flexible PV modules is due to the fact that CIGS technology is susceptible to humidity. The most vulnerable is the ingress of moisture from the module's package, which enters the transparent conductive oxide TCO of the photovoltaic cell, which is a layer in the CIGS thin film cell.
Companies participating in the PVMRW conference include Dow Corning, DuPont, Saint Gobain, Mitsubishi Plastics and 3M, all of which propose multiple effective ways to prevent moisture ingress, especially for CIGS batteries. If the diagnosis of TCO humidity in the CIGS technology is the main factor, NREL recommends that those packaging solutions that are expensive and unproven are not needed.
At the PVMRW conference, many CIGS manufacturers have come up with solutions for reliability. For example, SoloPower has just announced that it plans to build a new plant in Oregon from the United States DOE loan of 197 million U.S. dollars to avoid the effects of light soaking (photo-wetting effect) in its CIGS manufacturing. Solarion compared the reliability of their CIGS in glass-to-glass packages and flexible packages. Ascent Solar (ASTI) proposed the CIGS accelerated erosion method and Nanosolar proposed the CIGS water avoidance design in order to improve reliability. In addition, adhesives such as ADCO can improve the reliability of edge seals and other adhesive solutions in BIPV applications can be applied to flexible CIGS.
Sunpower's report is instructive. It proposes failure modes for various systems and can understand the importance of reliability from their large historical data on yields. Sunpower's acquisition of Powerlight may help them compare the functional data of various manufactured products over several years. In the PVMRW meeting, the failure of each company to communicate with each other is an important symbol of the conference. To illustrate, Sunpower's modules have solved reliability issues.
Reliability has regional characteristics
The first time you hear the reliability of a geographical feature. Although all modules require a set of tests to increase the confidence of today's PV products. Obviously, the above test does not have a certain relationship with the life of the actual PV product. The above tests only indicate the possibility of a long life, and the test only reflects the general explanation of the failure mechanism of the applied product in hot and wet areas.
The new specific regional reliability test is conducted in a hot dry environment. From the results, it is more advantageous than the application in cold and wet environments. NREL's Rommel Noufi suggested that the PV industry be very similar to today's highways. The implication of this statement is that the high-speed routing manufacturers will work together to drive various vehicles. It is very similar and there are many PV manufacturers from all regions. In the future they have various solutions.
At the PVMRW conference, we focused on three aspects: crystalline silicon, focused PV and thin-film PV. CIGS dominates in the discussion of thin film solar cells and may be related to cost and efficiency. Thanks to everyone's efforts to find out the humidity is the culprit, I believe the future PV market will have greater development, and photovoltaic products should have more than 20 years of reliable life.
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