BACK CONTACT SOLAR CELLS

The Solar Technology Of The Future !

When it comes to getting the most out of any solar panel, every dealer, distributor and manufacturer will tell you the same thing. The number one cardinal rule for peak performance when using a solar panel is never, never, ever shade the cells of a solar panel.

So why does almost every solar cell manufacturer shade their solar cell's by placing the energy collection grids on the front of their cells ???

Take a look at the front of any conventional solar panel and on each individual solar cell you will notice silver colored lines running horizontally and vertically. These line are screen printed on the surface of each cell and serves as an energy collection grid.

Unfortunately these collection grids inefficiently block sunlight and can cause up to a 10% shading loss which translates into less power potential from each cell.

Now take a look at a cell that is used in the Reliagen solar panel.

You won't see any collection grids that cause shading on these cells because they are located on the back of the cell.

Back contact solar cells offer several major advantages over older front contact solar cell technology.

Moving all the contacts to the back of the cell eliminates contact shading, leading to a high short-circuit current.

Back contact solar cells offer average efficiencies of up to 20% resulting in a smaller module footprint.

By placing all of the contacts on the back of the cell, series resistance losses are reduced as the trade-off between series resistance and reflectance is completely avoided and contacts can be made much larger.

Having all the contacts on the one side of the cell greatly simplifies cell stringing during module fabrication and improves the packing factor.

The reduced stress on the cell wafers during the interconnection process improves yields, especially for large thin wafers.

The more uniform appearance of the solar module is desirable for architectural applications.

Every solar dealer will tell you that their solar panel offers high efficiency. The simplest way to compare efficiencies is to compare dimensions of each solar panel. The higher the efficiency the smaller the footprint will be when comparing the same wattage solar panel.

For example:

Here are the dimensions of a famous maker's 90 watt mono-crystalline solar panel compared to Reliagen's mono-crystalline back contact 95 watt solar panel.

Famous maker's 90 watt dimensions 56.93 x 22.80

Reliagen's 95 watt dimensions 40.83 x 20.75

We divided the dimensions of both the Reliagen panel and the famous makers panel by a ratio of ten and then using Photoshop we took a generic image of a solar panel and applied the scaled down dimensions to the same image to give you a graphic illustration of how much smaller Reliagen's footprint is to that of the competitors product.

Not only is the Reliagen panel an incredible 16 inches shorter and 2 inches smaller in width, the Reliagen panel puts out 5 more watts than the famous maker's solar panel. Now that's high efficiency !

Once in a great while a new technology emerges that literally shakes the very foundation of the industry that it serves. For the solar industry this IS that new technology !

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