Yingli Green Energy Holding Company Limited (NYSE: YGE) (“Yingli Solar” or “Yingli”), one of the world’s leading solar panel manufacturers, today announced an update on the partnership with Picasolar Inc. and the progress being made to deploy an innovative Hydrogen Super Emitter (HSE) into pilot production under the Department of Energy SunShot Program.
The U.S. Department of Energy SunShot Initiative is a national effort to drive down the cost of solar electricity and support solar adoption. SunShot aims to make solar energy a low-cost electricity source for all Americans through research and development efforts in collaboration with public and private partners. Through SunShot, the Energy Department supports efforts by private companies, universities, and national laboratories to drive down the cost of solar electricity. Yingli Americas partnered with Picasolar Inc in 2016 and the collaboration received a $2m SunShot award with the goal of moving the selective emitter technology to production for n-type solar cells.
Within the first year of the partnership, absolute efficiency improvements exceeding 0.3% absolute have been demonstrated on production cells and key reliability testing has been performed at third-party laboratories. Current work is focused on further improvements in cell efficiency, demonstrating cell-to-cell process uniformity, and scaling up the manufacturing equipment.
“Module efficiency is one of the largest levers available to continue driving down the cost-per-watt,” commented Sergiu Pop, Director of Business Development for Yingli Americas. “The technology developed by Picasolar not only improves conversion efficiencies but also enables us to further optimize the grid spacing to save on silver. Ultimately this delivers more value to our customers.”
“Access to Yingli’s manufacturing expertise has been a game-changer for us,” said Douglas Hutchings, CEO of Picasolar. “Over the past year we have transitioned from optimizing the process on custom built lab cells all the way to demonstrations on cells pulled directly from manufacturing. We are working with potential funding sources to establish US based equipment manufacturing and look forward to the next stage of our growth with Yingli.”
