Chinese company Trina Solar has set a new world record for the conversion efficiency of a certain type of solar module, the company announced in a statement on Monday.
In laboratory tests, Trina’s large-area N-type fully passivated heterojunction (HJT) modules showed an efficiency of 25.44 percent, according to results certified by Germany’s Fraunhofer CalLab, a solar research organization. .
Passivation is a technology that covers defects on the surface of a solar cell, while cell efficiency refers to the percentage of solar energy hitting a device that is converted into usable electricity. Increasing cell efficiency can help reduce the size needed for solar installations as well as reduce costs.
Professor Martin Green of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, whose laboratory has held the record for solar cell efficiency for decades, said the results demonstrated the potential of HJT solar technology, one of the many technologies vying to become the predominant next-generation technology in the sector. .
“In the long term, it’s all about efficiency, so while some sequences are currently more expensive than others, what tends to happen is that as the industry moves into more new technology, the cost comes down pretty quickly,” Green said.