Product and Service

In the past few years, photovoltaic industry maintained rapid growth and accelerated its high-quality transformation and development. Especially with stimulation of Top Runner Program and “Made in China 2025” Strategy, high-efficiency technology has developed rapidly. According to China Photovoltaic Industry Association, the conversion efficiency of cells has increased annually from 0.3% to over 0.5% in average in the past two years. However, with fluctuation of policies and trends, increasing pressure on the grid parity of power station investors and higher demand for electricity costs, iterative technological innovation is the only ultimate driving force to promote the industry to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and to maintain steady and sustainable development.

It takes time for high-efficiency technology to achieve real maturity and large-scale applications. “Taking the cost reduction of the monocrystal PERC technology as an example, it took the industry about five years to reduce cost. At first, each enterprise made a pilot line, tried different technical paths, produced products in small batches, and then conducted various performance tests, during which various mass production problems like cost would occur. Four to five years later, PERC technology didn’t achieve cost reduction until 2017. This is a very typical development process for a new generation technology, from R&D to mass production,” said Dr. Liyou Yang, general manager of Jinergy.

For Jinergy, which aims to be top 5% of the world's advanced capacities, the iterative rolling development of the photovoltaic industry is an inherent law. Dr. Yang believes that, as to the photovoltaic industry where the gross profit margin has been tightened, enterprises need to give more consideration to input and output at the current stage, and that the ultra-high efficiency heterojunction modules with many advantages may significantly accelerate the cost reduction of electricity further.

By now, mass production efficiency of Jinergy's ultra-high efficiency heterojunction cells has reached 23.27%. After the test of the third-party, Jinergy's 60-cell bifacial modules in mass production had power output of 332.6W in front side. Being characterized by bifacial power generation, rear side can generate 10%-30% additional power in application scenarios like the grass, concrete floor, snow and reflective cloth. The temperature coefficient of the power is as low as-0.27%/°C. Compared with regularpolycrystalline ones, Jinergy's heterojunction modules can save34% of the power loss at the operating temperature of 75°C.

In terms of the cost reduction of heterojunction technology, Dr. Yang holds that it is necessary to start in the following four aspects. He revealed: "First of all, low-temperature silver paste takes up a relatively large proportion of cost. Now the amount of silver paste is about five times that of traditional cells, and the low-temperature silver paste itself has more slurry and higher silver content. In order to effectively reduce the cost in this regard, we can reduce its cost by 50%-70% now by combining techniques like multi-busbar and Shingled-cell. Secondly, the costs of special equipment, such as ITO target, texturing additive and CVD, could also be reduced to a large extent.

In the view of Jinergy, successful cost reduction of the heterojunction technology, coupled with the expected scale effect, can make it possible for the cost of the ultra-high efficiency technology to equal that of the monocrystal PERC per watt.“This is a breakthrough in that it boasts obvious advantages— having much higher efficiency than that of PERC and plus the excellent performances of gain reduction. So it is likely that the heterojunction will become the next generation of mainstream technology within two years,”Yang Liyou stressed.

As to current fluctuations occurringin the industry, Dr. Yang believes that these cyclical fluctuations have resulted from the fact that the photovoltaic industry is still in a policy-driven stage and yet not guided by the market. The key is that the development of the enterprise must follow the development pace of the market and the technology.