THE ECONOMIC CASE FOR IBC SILICON HETEROJUNCTION SOLAR CELLS

摘要

Interdigitated back contacted (IBC) solar cells based on silicon heterojunction (SHJ) technologies have been steadily gaining interest due to record breaking efficiencies at the laboratory scale. However, most SHJ-IBC solar cell design architectures require increased process flow complexity, which bring their commercial viability into question. In this work, the cost of ownership (CoO) of SHJ-IBC solar cells and modules using self-aligned tunnel-contacts is projected. This is compared to the CoO of conventional SHJ and PERC technologies. We project a module CoO of only 0.275 {EUR}/W_(pk) for the SHJ-IBC concept, which is less than the CoO of standard SHJ modules but still marginally higher than PERC modules. This implies that the SHJ-IBC concept evaluated in this work, using tunnel-contacts can, indeed, be cost-competitive with leading high efficiency technologies at the industrial scale.