In latest months, China’s Risen Power has posted spectacular module efficiencies, closing at 24%, with its hyper-ion collection. The corporate will ramp as much as large-scale manufacturing of those heterojunction merchandise within the first half of 2023, and pv journal just lately caught up with Risen Power’s Chief Info Officer Terry Wu to debate this, in addition to the corporate’s work on vitality storage initiatives.
Risen Power has achieved some spectacular effectivity outcomes with the Hyper-ion collection – when will we see these modules in the marketplace?
Now we’re within the pilot part of manufacturing, with the take a look at line up and working. And we anticipate to begin full business manufacturing at our base in Jiangsu province within the first half of the 12 months. By the top of the 12 months, we shall be producing heterojunction modules on the identical price as PERC and TOPCon. In manufacturing, the very best cell effectivity is over 25.6% and the common effectivity is 22.5% for the modules.
The primary strains of operation shall be 5 GW for cells and 10 GW for modules. The second part will add one other 4 GW of cell manufacturing and 6 GW for modules, so in whole our present plan for heterojunction expertise is for 9 GW of cell capability and 16 GW of module.
Are you totally dedicated to heterojunction for the long run, is Risen exploring some other cell applied sciences?
For cell expertise, our coverage is heterojunction first. That is our first alternative and our primary focus. Nevertheless, we may even be engaged on TOPCon.
We see TOPCon as greater than “PERC plus” expertise. When you have PERC capability, you have to improve it to TOPCon, in any other case your manufacturing strains will quickly change into ineffective. We are going to observe up on TOPCon expertise and have a look at upgrading our PERC strains and preserve them accessible for some time.
Final 12 months we introduced an funding in 10 GW of latest capability that may even be TOPCon, and this may additional deliver our capability for cell manufacturing nearer to what now we have for modules .
While you get to those massive manufacturing numbers for HJT, the silver content material turns into a little bit of an issue. Is that one thing you’ve in your roadmap to deal with?
Silver-coated copper is the expertise we’re at the moment engaged on, and we expect it’ll quickly change into an business commonplace utilized by most corporations that make heterojunction cells.
At Risen Power, now we have decreased silver consumption to 9-10 milligrams per watt, when a few of our rivals are nonetheless round 12, and the business common is 14. So we’re main on this space, and as soon as we begin working with copper silver coating, we are able to cut back it once more by nearly 50%.
Heterojunction is often known as one of many easiest applied sciences to mix with perovskite and type a tandem cell – does Risen work on this too?
Now we have established a analysis and improvement group centered on this, centered on constructing extra information and talent on the cell and module degree for tandem expertise. It’s nonetheless within the analysis part, and we hope to have some achievements to announce later this 12 months.
However for our R&D group as an entire, the precedence is to scale back the price of heterojunction manufacturing. That is actually what we’ll deal with for the remainder of the 12 months and subsequent. After this, we are able to have a look at including extra expertise and capabilities, however for now there’s nonetheless work to be finished at HJT.
Risen can also be lively within the vitality storage enterprise, how is it progressing?
That is proper, we usually do engineering, procurement and development work for big, utility-scale battery initiatives. In america, I feel we’re now one of many prime three suppliers of large-scale vitality storage. We’re additionally lively in Europe, and have additionally began in Australia. Globally, we’re the ninth or tenth largest participant in massive vitality storage initiatives.
Many of those are solar-related batteries, we try to offer a one-stop store for builders – PV and storage.
And are you additionally trying on the vitality saving aspect of issues?
Sure, and now we have a 300 MWh battery manufacturing unit, it produces a unique expertise although, which we principally promote in Japan.
For us it’s extra enterprise to place the battery cells collectively, and ship them, to the US for instance. Just like the PV module enterprise.
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