Commercialized solar cells aim to achieve over 24% efficiency in the near future. Since PERC cell gradually approaches its efficiency limit, TOPCon solar cell is regarded as the most promising technology to be the major product in the next solar cell generation which can replace PERC cells. For this topic, the 6th PERC+, N Type c-Si Cell and TOPCon Forum is held in Changzhou, China last week. Jolywood, Longi, Jinko, Trina, Chint, etc. leading solar manufactures shared their progresses in TOPCon research development.
Dr. Zhifeng Liu, vice general manager of Jolywood, was invited to this forum and made a speech about the development of Jolywood TOPCon mass production technology. He stated:“As technology of solar cell tends to be mature, the reduction of the cost of Si, glass, installation system and mounting rack is very difficult. In the future, the reduction of LCOE of solar energy depends on the increments of solar cells’ efficiency. Based on the current cost, 1% efficiency increment will reduce 2.82cents/Wp.”
“Compare with PERC cell, TOPCon cell has higher potential on efficiency and stablility.” LID and LeTID are always a big problem of PERC cells. However, the TOPCon cell doesn’t have the risk of LID and LeTID due to the features of N-type c-Si. Furthermore, the efficiency limit of TOPCon cells is around 28.7% which is much higher than 25% of PERC and 27.5% of HJT. It is very close to ideal efficiency limit of c-Si, 29.43%. Thus, TOPCon cell has higher potential to develop.
Dr. Liu continued, “In the past few years, Jolywood had great achievenments on N-type TOPCon solar cell. The efficiencies of TOPCon solar cells reach 24.5%. The new technology, J-TOPCon 2.0, published by Jolywood apply the original POPAID (Plasma Oxidation&Plasma Assisted Insitu-doping Deposition) technology. Compare with J-TOPCon 1.0, 2.0 reduces the processing steps and achieve the higher efficiency and yield.” J-TOPCon 2.0 curtail 3 manufacturing processing steps. The single-side surface poly-Si deposition and doping of poly-Si can be completed in one step which can further decrease the cost. J-TOPCon 2.0 achieves 24.5% solar cell efficiency by omitting the etching step of wrap-around Poly-Si which avoid the damage of pyramids of the surface.
In addition, Dr. Liu indicates that “TOPCon module produces more electricity per watt compared with p type. Each 10W increment on the module will bring 0.05RMB/W premium. In the future, the LCOE of TOPCon modules will be continuing reducing to achieve the same cost of PERC modules.”
In the meanwhile, the representative of Trina Solar, Dr. Daming Chen and the representative of Jinko Solar, Dr. Xinyu Zhang both admitted that the TOPCon solar cell will become to the major product in the future. In the further development, Perovskite-Si Tandem solar cell has more potential to achieve over 30% efficiency,