Encapsulants for Future Solar Cell Technologies: Can Dominance of EVA be Replaced?

We at Alishan, have a clear vision to serve the industry with robust encapsulants and backsheet materials by touching the base of the latest cell technologies and their critical pain points.

July 22, 2024. By News Bureau

Tags:

articles

Solar Cell Technologies

Alishan Green Energy

Manufacturing

Solar Cell

encapsulation challenges

High-efficiency modules

Solar module

Nikhil Agrawal

The solar industry is at its best commercial developments in the last two decades and we can clearly see the advancements not only in terms of GW scale production or installations but also at the R&D level, be it improving the efficiency of cells, manufacturing ultra-high conductive contact materials, solving the encapsulation challenges, or assembling the BOM most reliably.

Keeping a close eye on the developing cell technology is extremely important when it comes to the manufacturing of other ancillaries that accompany solar cells inside a solar module. We at Alishan, have a clear vision to serve the industry with robust encapsulants and backsheet materials by touching the base of the latest cell technologies and their critical pain points.

Though the industry has moved from mono PERC to now TopCon and HJT high-efficiency modules, still there is a clear gap in identifying the best encapsulation material, that overcomes the so-called 'shortcomings' of traditional EVA.

At Alishan, we strongly believe that it will not be a smooth way to transition from traditional EVA to any other encapsulant as the industry has already seen the performance of this champion material past 35 years and knows well about its behavior in certain conditions. The more challenging situation will arise when there will be a transition from current-generation technologies to 3rd and 4th generations like thin films and organic PV. The question now also is the same, will we need a whole new family of encapsulation materials or a backsheet solution?

It is not an exaggeration if we say that currently for any other encapsulation material than EVA, there is a lot of ambiguity in accepting the materials as reliable as EVA, majorly because still we do not understand the best lamination process for these materials. Regardless, the new materials like POE and EPE have outperformed EVA in lab scale studies and at R&D levels, but to mimic the same performance in the field for modules made with production pressures of GW scales is a real challenge.

In this context, we believe that even for upcoming technologies, the Industry should reinvestigate the 'shortcomings' of EVA and properly address them with a solution-based approach. At Alishan, we are committed to investing more efforts and energy in upcoming years compared to all previous years to bring out the true potential of EVA on the table.

With expansion plans of more than 4 GW by year-end, we are more focused on developing a variety of EVA-based encapsulants which might be a game changer in the market.

- Nikhil Agrawal, Director, Alishan Green Energy Pvt. Ltd.