tslas
Member
From the article you linked:
However, the company just announced what it's calling High Efficiency Honey Ultra, a module that purportedly has a 24.4% efficiency rating. Considering that its current panels operate at around 16% efficiency, and SunPower's industry-leading panels are closer to 21% -- almost 32% more power output per panel than Trina's -- this could be a remarkable breakthrough for the company, if it could translate that module efficiency to a panel efficiency near 20%.
This guy has completely no idea what he is talking about. I think that The Motley Fool should be completely embarrassed for letting this fool write this article about solar panels. He is completely clueless, and there are more errors in that one paragraph than I can count (I did not read the rest of the article though):
1. Module and panel is the exact same thing. The author does not understand this.
2. The High Efficiency Honey Ultra module that TSL just created is a p-type mono module that was created in a lab under perfect conditions to break some meaningless record for p-type panels. I estimate that the module had roughly ~20% efficiency, but the actual production module of the exact same module will have roughly 17% - 18% efficiency at best.
3. The 24.4% that he is referring to is a cell that uses IBC technology (Interdigitated back contact solar cells). This IBC cell is completely different than the p-type mono cell used in the Honey Ultra Modules. The 24.4% has nothing to do with the Honey ultra module. This author is mixing up two completely different technologies.
There are very few people in this world that actually have a relatively good grasp of the solar industry. Most of the people that write about solar do not understand it at all. Most of the people that work in the solar industry do not understand it all. Most of the people in the utility industry do not understand it at all.
The solar industry is completely misunderstood and it will take a few years before people actually start getting it. Fortunately for us solar demand is growing so strong that people will need to start understanding it better in a very short period of time, because it is going to grow out of control and that is dangerous without understanding consequences.
Sleepyhead,
Thanks for your thoughts on that article. To be fair to author, though, he/she also is skeptical of this new panels from Trina (Hence I said "not guaranteed yet") and advices to stay with SPWR (Though article is more for the stock)..
I certainly didn't know about p-type and IBC.. off to google to learn about it .
Thanks again.