EDINBURGH: The solar industry has spent decades slashing the cost of generating electricity direct from the sun. Now it’s focusing on making panels even more powerful.

       With savings in equipment manufacturing hitting a plateau, and more recently pressured by rising prices of raw materials, producers are stepping up work on advances in technology – building better components and employing increasingly sophisticated designs to generate more electricity from the same-sized solar farms.

       “The first 20 years in the 21st century saw huge reductions in module prices, but the speed of the reduction started to level off noticeably in the past two years,” said Xiaojing Sun, global solar research leader at Wood Mackenzie Ltd.

       “Fortunately, new technologies will create further cost-of-electricity reductions.”

       A push for more powerful solar equipment underscores how further cost reductions remain essential to advance the shift away from fossil fuels.

       While grid-sized solar farms are now typically cheaper than even the most advanced coal or gas-fired plants, additional savings will be required to pair clean energy sources with the expensive storage technology that’s needed for around-the-clock carbon-free power.

       Bigger factories, the use of automation and more efficient production methods have delivered economies of scale, lower labour costs and less material waste for the solar sector.

       The average cost of a solar panel dropped by 90% from 2010 to 2020.

       Boosting power generation per panel means developers can deliver the same amount of electricity from a smaller-sized operation.

       That’s potentially crucial as costs of land, construction, engineering and other equipment haven’t fallen in the same way as panel prices.

       It can even make sense to pay a premium for more advanced technology.

       “We’re seeing people willing to pay a higher price for a higher wattage module that lets them produce more power and make more money off their land,” said Jenny Chase, lead solar researcher at BloombergNEF.

       Higher-powered systems are already arriving.

       Through much of the past decade, most solar panels produced a maximum of about 400 watts of electricity.

       In early 2020, companies began selling 500-watt panels, and in June, China-based Risen Energy Co introduced a 700-watt model.

       For most of the 2010s, the standard solar wafer was a 156-millimeter (6.14 inches) square of polysilicon, about the size of the front of a CD case.

       Now, companies are making the squares bigger to boost efficiency and reduce manufacturing costs.

       Producers are pushing 182- and 210-millimeter wafers, and the larger sizes will grow from about 19% of the market share this year to more than half by 2023, according to Wood Mackenzie’s Sun.

       The factories that wire wafers into cells – which convert electrons excited by photons of light into electricity – are adding new capacity for designs like heterojunction or tunnel-oxide passivated contact cells.

       While more expensive to make, those structures allow the electrons to keep bouncing around for longer, increasing the amount of power they generate. — Bloomberg