Advanced analytics for both thin film technologies with silicon as well as CIGS: Beside highly developed deposition tools, a comprehensive infrastructure was set up at PVcomB. Here, a glass substrate is loaded into a multi-chamber deposition tool where it will be deposited with only a few micrometers of silicon layers forming finally the active part a solar cell. (Credit: Berlin Partner für Wirtschaft und Technologie / Monique Wüstenhagen)Japanese company Solar Frontier announced a new world record conversion efficiency for thin-film-photovoltaic technologies at the 5th International Workshop on CIGS Solar Cell Technology organized by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB).
Solar Frontier, in joint research with the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), has achieved 20.9% conversion efficiency on a 0.5 cm2 CIGS cell. This is a world record conversion efficiency for thin-film photovoltaic technologies, beating Solar Frontier’s previous world record of 19.7% conversion efficiency for CIGS thin-film cells that do not contain cadmium, on top of the previous-best 20.8% cell efficiency record set for all thin-film PV technologies. The result has been independently verified by the Fraunhofer Institute, Europe’s largest application-oriented research organization.
“Solar Frontier’s new 20.9% efficiency record resulted from a CIS cell cut from a 30 cm by 30 cm substrate produced using a sputtering-selenization formation method—the same method we use in our factories. The significance is twofold: it ensures we can transfer our latest achievement into mass production faster, and it proves the long-term conversion efficiency potential of Solar Frontier’s proprietary CIS technology,” said Satoru Kuriyagawa, Chief Technology Officer of Solar Frontier. “Solar Frontier has entered into the next phase in the development of CIS technology, and we look forward to building on this achievement and driving our efficiency even higher.”
Prof. Dr. Rutger Schlatmann, head of PVcomB and organizer of the workshop is pleased with the message: “Congratulations to Solar Frontiers. We are happy, that they have chosen our workshop to announce this great result. This shows that the event is well established in the thin film community and has a very good reputation.”
Solar Frontier Kabushiki Kaisha is a fully owned subsidiary of Showa Shell Sekiyu. It was founded in 2006 as Showa Shell Solar, and renamed Solar Frontier in April 2010.
