MORE EFFICIENT SOLAR PANELS

Imagine you are thinking of installing solar panels to generate your own electricity in your home, in your business, then you should know which are the more efficient solar panels. but you do not have too much free space on your roof or you want them to be of the best possible quality.

MORE EFFICIENT SOLAR PANELS

In those cases you have to  look for the most efficient solar panels on the market to make the most of your available space.

And it is also that it is usually fulfilled that the most efficient solar panels are, coincidentally, the highest quality there is.

It is very common, more than desirable, to find projects, tenders, offers today … They speak of solar panels with 16-17% efficiency as high efficiency panels, which is flatly false.

An efficiency of  16-17% is something standard , it does not mean that it is neither good nor bad, it is simply something standard.

The high efficiency, in a solar panel, can be considered  from 19% .

It is also true that, nowadays, you can find many articles on the Internet that talk about solar panel efficiency, but after having reviewed many of them, we have to say that most of them are incorrect. 

Some are outdated  and  many are simply false  that only seek a commercial promotion.

The outdated articles  is why you should understand that solar cells are progressively improving their efficiency year after year, so that a solar solar panel of an X efficiency, probably in 1 or 2 years has improved.

Therefore, the lists of most efficient solar panels should be updated, at least, every year.

The others,  the articles that are false , fall by their own weight. You will recognize why they usually talk about Chinese brands, why they show prices and why they do not provide any document that demonstrates that, effectively, that efficiency is real and is superior to other panels. It is pure  commercial disinformation,  dishonest and without any rigor.

Well, in this article we will show what are  really the 10 most efficient solar panels that exist in the photovoltaic market in 2019.

Technologies and efficiency of solar panels:

As you well know, in the photovoltaic sector there are 2 technologies that predominate, which are the Monocrystalline and the Polycrystalline. Well, but within the Monocrystalline there are also variations of technology, some conventional such as the PERC, the PERT … and other exclusive as the HIT of Panasonic and the IBC (Maxeon) of SunPower.

To see a  REAL graph  of technologies and their efficiencies, we show you a study  done in 2018  that shows exactly that, a comparison of the types of technology that exist and their efficiencies:

Explaining a little the comparative graph of efficiency:

• On the Y axis on the left, you can see panel power. That is,  up to what powers  are each of the solar panels coming depending on their technology.
• On the X axis (the bottom one), you can see the  types of technology . From left to right they would be the P-Multi (Polycrystalline), the P-Mono (Monocrystalline) and the N-Mono (Monocrystalline of high purity).
• On the Y axis on the right, you can see the  cell efficiency  in each case. Eye, cell efficiency, not panel (always something less).
• On the green bars, the standard power of that technology is shown with the corresponding efficiency. That is, for example, for the P-Mono PERC, the standard is 300W with cell efficiency (not panel) of 21.4%.

As you can see, it is very illustrative that  the most efficient solar panels that exist  are those that incorporate the monocrystalline technologies HIT and IBC, which use type N silicon. That is, Panasonic and SunPower fundamentally.

And a little further away would come the panels that use Mono PERC technology with P-type silicon.

And finally, the least efficient solar panels are those that use Multi (Polycrystalline) technology also with P-type silicon.

As an aside , mention that the panels that use  type N silicon  are of a much higher quality than the rest, because that type of silicon is the purest that exists in the photovoltaic industry.

While those that use  type P silicon , it is a type of silicon with some impurities, and that is why, in addition to other factors, it never reaches the efficiencies of a solar panel with type N silicon.

This is the reality of the photovoltaic sector when panel efficiency is concerned.

Table of the 10 most efficient solar panels that exist in the photovoltaic market in 2019:

Once the issue of the efficiencies of each technology has been clarified, we show the list of solar panels that have greater efficiency in the current photovoltaic sector. They are the following:

This would be an  updated version in February 2019 with the most efficient panels that exist in the current photovoltaic market .

All of them are verifiable and verifiable, you can simply search the web of each manufacturer, the technical sheet of each of these panels and look where they indicate the efficiency of each of these models.

In this article  we have not considered bifacial solar panels , for one reason:

Being a panel type of new implementation there is still no real data of how much more produced by its back face. In fact, it is absolutely unpredictable to know.

On the other hand, the aforementioned  current bifacial panels have a series of problems  with the shadows that project on the back of the cell the components of the panel, such as the junction box, the cables and even the panel frames, which in the long run They can cause hot spots.

Since nobody is infallible, if Do you know other models of solar panels more efficient than those shown ?, contact us and we will analyze it to incorporate it into the list.

What is the most efficient solar panel?

Before answering the question we must make it clear that it is the efficiency of a solar panel.

What is the efficiency of a solar panel?

Efficiency is a parameter that tells us how much area or surface a solar panel requires to produce energy.

This gives us a ratio of size and power. In simple words, the smaller and more powerful is more efficient, but the cost will be higher. If we have enough area on the roof, it is an unnecessary expense to pay for space saving when in most cases there are architectural applications where it is justified. the cost of putting a panel that uses less area.

What is the average standard efficiency?

The standard average efficiency is 15% and the most commercially available is 21% manufactured by SunPower.

There are panels up to 46% efficiency and are used in satellites or spacecraft of NASA, this gives us an idea in the future the panels that reach 90% will give us 6 times more energy with the same current size.

https://photovoltaicsolarenergy.org/solar-panels/compare-types-of-solar-panels/

What is the temperature coefficient?

A solar panel in hot conditions causes its energy production to drop, it is popularly thought that it works with heat but it is the opposite, these work with light thanks to the photoelectric effect and at cool temperatures it improves its performance.

There are different technologies (for example: Amorpho, Polycrystalline, Monocrystalline, CdTe, etc …) It is the responsibility of the engineer to suggest the appropriate cell and the installation techniques to reduce such effects in the specific project.

In systems with less than 30 modules, the loss is not very significant, but in systems larger than 1000 modules it must be considered.

Read more about the best brands of solar panels