Product and Service

As the energy supply reform is deepened in China these years, the PV power generation industry has achieved a rapid development. According to the data released by WANG Bohua, Vice Chairman and Secretary-general of China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA) in the recent Seminar for 2017 Review and 2018 Outlook of Photovoltaic Industry, the newly increased installed capacity of the market reached 53GW in 2017, i.e. a 53.6% rise year on year, and the distributed PV growth exceeded 350%; the yield of modules was about 70GW, up 21.3% year on year; and the production scale of cells and modules has been ranked No. 1in the world for 10 consecutive years, and the cost of modules dropped to nearly $0.30 dollar per watt.

According to the insiders, the fast growth of installed capacity and continuous reduction of modules and other links of the industry chain cannot be achieved without the favorable industry policies and constant technical innovation. On the one hand, the “Top Runner” Program has achieved a good result because the PV industry has made a significant technologicalprogress, achieved a great reduction in cost and driven the bidding electricity price of global PV projects to drop constantly. On the other hand, the promotion of electricity bidding mechanism has greatly stimulated the development potential of the PV industry and also forced the accelerated iteration of the PV power generation technologies, helping raise the requirements on system design efficiency and further facilitating the reduction of LCOE. 

With the expedited industrial transformation and upgrading, how to further reduce LCOE and raise the efficiency of PV power station has become the focus of various photovoltaic enterprises during the selection of equipment. With the trend, the third Photovoltaic Power Station Design and Equipment Selection Seminar themed by “Way to Achieve Grid Parity”was held smoothly in Shanghai today (January 29th). Leaders and experts from governmental agencies, research institutions, electric power design institutes, photovoltaic enterprises and power station investment enterprises got together and made an in-depth discussion of the hot topics including the decreasing trend of photovoltaic power generation cost at home and abroad, innovation and application of technical products, building of experiment base, and data analysis. TANG Zhengkai, the product manager of Jinneng Clean Energy Technology Ltd. (“JINERGY”), the leading PV modules supplier in ShanxiProvince, delivered a speech titled by “Module Selection by Photovoltaic Power Stations under the BiddingMechanism”. 

“High-efficiency modules are the key for reduction of LCOE and realization of grid parity, but the so-called high-efficiency modules must be featured by high efficiency, high generating capacity and low cost”, TANG Zhengkai said. “Taking the domestic ground power stations for examples, the higher the module power is, the lower the system BOS cost will be. Therefore, the whole industry is committed to constantly improving the power generation efficiency and promoting the constant reduction of LCOE.”

To developers of power stations, selection of the modules that account for 45% of the initial investment is the key factor that decides the profits of power stations. Regarding the domestic ground power stations, in order to realize the same LCOE, the reasonable difference in price among various types of modules is RMB0.04 Yuan/W if the module power rises every 10W; however, in distributed PV power stations, application of higher-efficiency modules could increase the income from investment if the BOS cost remains unchanged. So far, JINERGY has achieved the mass production of 280W high-efficiency polycrystalline PV modules and 305W monocrystalline PERC modules. 

However, since the cost of PERC monocrystalline PV modules is relatively high, the remarkable reduction of LCOE can be seen only in sites with high BOS cost like land and labor. JINERGY has also completed the layout of super high-efficiency heterojunction technology at the same time. 

As introduced, the conversion efficiency of the bifacial HJT ultra high-efficiency modules developed by JINERGY has already exceeded 23%, and meanwhile the HJT modules are featured by excellent weak light response, ultra low temperature coefficient, no PID and LID, and the extremely low attenuation rate of less than 1% in the first year and not exceeding 0.4% year by year. What’s more, with the 8%-20% generating capacity in different environment brought by dual glass encapsulation and double-sided generation, the overall generating capacity of the bifacial HJT ultra high-efficiency modules is 44% higher than that of conventional high-efficiency modules. 

So far, HJT modules could keep the same LCOE even though their unit price is 40% higher than that of conventional polycrystalline PV modules. In future, with the constant breakthrough made by JINERGY’s technical team, it’s expected that the gap of the overall cost between HJT product and conventional polycrystalline PV modules will shrink to 20% or less, greatly facilitating the PV power generation at grid parity.