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Recently, Solartech Universal made headlines as part of solar machine maker Meyer Burger's heterojunction (HJT) solar cell and SmartWire (SWT) hardware announcements. Meyer Burger announced their new hardware manufacturing lines using a Solartech Universal solar panel. The 'champion module' hit 334.9W – a 20.5% solar panel efficiency. The cells used in the panel hit as high as 24.02% – higher than JinkoSolar's 23.45% (albeit with a different cell type).
Solartech Universal says this panel should be available in 2018 as the company works through the challenges of integrating the new manufacturing hardware into the current line (see Solartech Universal panel assembly video at end of article). The specification page for the panel family is available on the website – it peaks at 330W models, and notes being available soon.
[...] Meyer Burger calls heterojunction 'the Solar Cell of the Future (pdf).' An actual heterojunction solar cell just hit 26.6% efficiency in November. Again, well beyond, Jinko's 23.45%. This greater efficiency is partially because of additional layers of solar material – amorphous silicon – that grabs a different wavelength of light to make electricity.
Source: https://electrek.co/2017/12/19/florida-company-solar-cell-of-the-future-500w-heterojunction/
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @05:39AM
A basic (if not a bit dated) graph of efficiency is here https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/PVeff%28rev171030%29.jpg [wikimedia.org] but there were 24% efficient solar cells (same efficiency as these) available in 1987. The problem is that making them was too expensive, just like the near-50% ones are today. The primary measure of solar cells used by people actually installing them is the Dollar per Watt (or Watt-peak). In that case, you can usually get much more bang for the buck by installing more less-efficient cells compared to fewer more-efficient cells.