KSC Seminar: Silicon heterojunction photovoltaics, the perfect choice for the hot-climate market
Date & Time: Tuesday August 15th, 2017 at 1pm
Venue: Building 5, level 5, room 5220
Light refreshments will be provided.
Abstract: Silicon solar cells with passivating contacts have emerged in recent years as the most promising high-efficiency photovoltaic technology. Such contacts avoid recombination of photo-generated charge carriers, enabling very high operating voltages. A prime example of such contact technology are silicon heterojunction solar cells, which use crystalline silicon wafers as optical absorbers and scalable thin-film deposition technology for contact formation. Thanks to their excellent surface passivation such solar cells have set the world-record energy-conversion efficiency (at 26.6% now) as well as lowest temperature coefficient of all silicon solar cell technologies. In this talk, we discuss how this technology is ideal for large-scale clean electricity generation in the hot-climate market. We will specifically address how their temperature coefficient can be further tuned and device heating minimized, aimed at ultimate performance under actual operating conditions. In a second part, I will give evidence that under light soaking, this technology improves further its efficiency - a rare feature for solar technologies - and discuss underlying physics.
Biography: Stefaan De Wolf has been working on silicon solar cells and materials at IMEC in Belgium and AIST in Japan. In 2008, he joined PV-lab at EPFL in Switzerland, as a team leader for its activities on high-efficiency silicon solar cells. Since September 2016, he is an Associate Professor at KAUST in Saudi Arabia working on high-efficiency photovoltaics for hot climates.