Record 17.8% CIS photovoltaic efficiency achieved by Solar Frontier
Tokyo, Japan--Copper, indium, selenium (CIS) thin-film photovoltaic (PV) solar-cell manufacturer Solar Frontier, a 100% subsidiary of Showa Shell Sekiyu, achieved a 17.8% aperture area conversion efficiency on a 30 cm x 30 cm CIS-based PV submodule in joint research with Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO; Kawasaki, Japan). This new record for thin-film CIS PV technology was accomplished at Atsugi Research Center (ARC), Solar Frontier's dedicated research laboratory in Japan that it says is the cornerstone of the company's integrated research and production framework.
"I would like to emphasize as we have before that this efficiency is on a fully integrated submodule, which our laboratory produces with processes very similar to what is in place in our factories at commercial production scale," said Satoru Kuriyagawa, CTO at Solar Frontier. "Even higher efficiencies can be achieved by using a device with a very small surface area, but the reason we prefer to focus on the submodule level is that the path to commercial production is more practical. This achievement confirms that we are on track to achieve the higher module efficiencies we are targeting in our commercial production efficiency roadmap."
This new record surpasses Solar Frontier's previous world record of 17.2% set in March 2011.
Solar Frontier's CIS modules are manufactured at its Kunitomi plant, which started full commercial operations last year. The technological advances made at ARC are applied to mass production through Solar Frontier's integrated research and production framework, which includes a pilot plant equipped with the machines on which the gigawatt-scale Kunitomi plant's machinery is based.
Solar Frontier is headquartered in Tokyo, with offices in Europe, the USA, and the Middle East.
SOURCE: Solar Frontier; www.solar-frontier.com/news/179
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.