Reliability
Solar electricity installations are very capital intensive and must perform to spec over 15 – 25 years to achieve a good return on investment. Therefore, quality and reliability are critical for financial success.
The big advantage of thin-film silicon solar panels is their low cost per watt and low cost per kWh. However, the active materials are very thin and can easily corrode if they are not well protected. Therefore, in addition to our focus on cost, we have an intense focus on reliability.
Learn more about reliability issues here >
We conducted an extensive study on reliability issues happened over time.
Three of the most frequent failure modes are:
Here are some examples of what we did to solve these issues:
Protection against corrosion
- a-Si is much less sensitive to corrosion than CdTe or CIGS.
- At an extra cost, we have a hermetic seal over the back of the active layers that
protects the silicon and minimizes power degradation from corrosion.
- Single sheet of glass, NO lamination to wick water at the edges of the module.
- No frame to collect water and dirt at the edges and encourage corrosion.
- All aluminum to aluminum interconnects to minimize corrosion at the contacts.
Protection against glass cracking
- At extra cost, we finish the edges of the glass to remove defects and avoid
cracks that can develop from the edge defects after thermal cycling.
- The glass is tempered. The heating and extremely rapid cooling during the
tempering process will crack glass that has any remaining defects.
Thus, glass with hidden defects will not be made into solar panels.
Protection against de-lamination
- Our modules are not laminated.
- There is no EVA to discolor overtime and no lamination to come apart.
- Our back coat is cured in place for superior adhesion compared to
a lamination process.
The result of our intense focus on reliability is that we have reduced the expected yearly decline in power from the typical 1% per year to almost zero. In accelerated testing at the independent testing lab at Arizona State University, in the three most critical tests, thermal cycling, humidity freeze and high temperature, high humidity, typical a-Si solar panels show almost 5% power loss.
NovaSolar solar panels show zero power loss! The people at the Arizona State Testing Lab told us that these were the best testing results they had even seen!
