In latest months, China’s Risen Vitality has posted spectacular module efficiencies, closing at 24%, with its hyper-ion sequence. The corporate will ramp as much as large-scale manufacturing of those heterojunction merchandise within the first half of 2023, and pv journal not too long ago caught up with Risen Vitality’s Chief Data Officer Terry Wu to debate this, in addition to the corporate’s work on power storage tasks.
Risen Vitality has achieved some spectacular effectivity outcomes with the Hyper-ion sequence – 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 start out full industrial manufacturing at our base in Jiangsu province within the first half of the 12 months. By the tip of the 12 months, we might be producing heterojunction modules on the similar price as PERC and TOPCon. In manufacturing, the very best cell effectivity is over 25.6% and the typical effectivity is 22.5% for the modules.
The primary strains of operation might 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 longer term, is Risen exploring another cell applied sciences?
For cell expertise, our coverage is heterojunction first. That is our first alternative and our major focus. Nonetheless, we may even be engaged on TOPCon.
We see TOPCon as greater than “PERC plus” expertise. You probably have PERC capability, you need to improve it to TOPCon, in any other case your manufacturing strains will quickly turn into ineffective. We’ll comply with up on TOPCon expertise and take a look at upgrading our PERC strains and maintain them out there for some time.
Final 12 months we introduced an funding in 10 GW of latest capability that may even be TOPCon, and it will additional convey our capability for cell manufacturing nearer to what we’ve got for modules .
Whenever 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 got in your roadmap to handle?
Silver-coated copper is the expertise we’re at the moment engaged on, and we expect it’ll quickly turn into an business commonplace utilized by most corporations that make heterojunction cells.
At Risen Vitality, we’ve got diminished 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 also called one of many easiest applied sciences to mix with perovskite and type a tandem cell – does Risen work on this too?
We’ve got established a analysis and growth staff targeted on this, targeted on constructing extra information and skill 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 staff as a complete, the precedence is to scale back the price of heterojunction manufacturing. That is actually what we will deal with for the remainder of the 12 months and subsequent. After this, we are able to take a look at including extra expertise and capabilities, however for now there may be nonetheless work to be finished at HJT.
Risen can also be energetic within the power storage enterprise, how is it progressing?
That is proper, we usually do engineering, procurement and development work for big, utility-scale battery tasks. In the USA, I feel we’re now one of many high three suppliers of large-scale power storage. We’re additionally energetic in Europe, and have additionally began in Australia. Globally, we’re the ninth or tenth largest participant in massive power storage tasks.
Many of those are solar-related batteries, we try to supply a one-stop store for builders – PV and storage.
And are you additionally trying on the power saving aspect of issues?
Sure, and we’ve got a 300 MWh battery manufacturing facility, 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. Much like the PV module enterprise.
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