The Meyer Burger Group and CSEM, with support from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy and of the Canton of Neuchâtel, will strengthen Switzerland’s position as leader for technological innovation in the photovoltaic sector and ensure its competitiveness as a major equipment provider in the international photovoltaic industry. The key is heterojunction silicon technology.
More than 37 Gigawatt peak (GWp) of photovoltaic (PV) output was installed in 2013. The cumulative global output by the end of 2013 will be approximately 140 GWp, leading to a major expansion in electrical energy in Europe. Photovoltaics will contribute significantly to the future global energy mix. Increasingly efficient modules and competitive technologies are making photovoltaic more economically viable while achieving lowest cost of energy (CHF/kWh).
Against this background, the Swiss-Inno HJT project is promoted and supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, industrial partners and the Canton of Neuchâtel for a budget of about 10 million Swiss Francs over 3 years. This grant promotes the setup of a pilot production system for high-efficiency cells with the goal of producing photovoltaic energy at lowest prices while illustrating the superiority of this innovative heterojunction technology in a demo system.
Heterojunction silicon technology (HJT) consists of ultra-thin (several thousandths of a micrometre) layers of amorphous silicon in the nanometre range that have been deposited on both sides of mono crystalline silicon wafers. The level of efficiency is higher than in standard cells with the production process actually requiring fewer steps. Additional advantages of the HJT technology are its remarkable temperature characteristics and its bi-faciality which can lead to increased energy efficiency (kWh/Wp). This is the basis of decreased energy costs (CHF/KwH). HJT technology also paves the way for low cost mass production of PV modules (less than 0.6 CHF/Wp). Development of the technology started in 2008 in a partnership between Roth and Rau, the competence centre for coating technologies within the Meyer Burger Group, and the Photovoltaics Laboratory of the IMT at EPFL.
