Project description
Next-generation solar manufacturing technology for European leadership
The solar energy industry faces increasing demands for cost-effective, high-volume production of advanced photovoltaic (PV) technologies while addressing resource constraints and efficiency challenges. Current manufacturing methods, particularly for Silicon Heterojunction and TOPCon solar cells, rely heavily on expensive materials and processes that hinder scalability and sustainability. To meet energy needs, the industry needs to boost efficiency and reduce production costs. In this context, the EU-funded SHINE PV will develop and demonstrate alternative innovative manufacturing routes for key production stages. By replacing silver with copper, introducing advanced materials and processes, and leveraging Industry 4.0-enabled equipment, the project aims to enhance efficiency by 0.5 % while cutting costs by 10 %, enabling a transformative leap in European PV manufacturing.
Objective
SHINE PV will develop alternative technological routes to PV production for Silicon Heterojunction and TOPCon solar cells, covering the three key steps in the back-end manufacturing: metallization, post-processing and interconnection. SHINE PV will demonstrate different flows and down-select the most promising ones in terms of cost of ownership and high volume manufacturing readiness. Advanced equipment at TRL7 with Industry 4.0 dedicated features, innovative materials and solutions will be developed.
For the metallization, SHINE PV will introduce parallel dispensing and plating as High Volume Manufacturing (HVM) alternative processes to incumbent screen printing, with the objective of demonstrating the complete or partial replacement of Ag with Cu, a fundamental step to enable Tera-Watt scale production levels.
Moreover, SHINE PV will increase the efficiency through cell post-processing by applying Light Soaking process in HVM and recover the cutting-induced losses by Edge Re-Passivation.
For the module making step, the innovations in interconnection proposed are Twill and Shingling processes and HVM equipment. Both will leverage on the optimization of the metallization and post-processing steps and will demonstrate their potential in terms of superior electrical properties, aesthetics, reliability, and compatibility with premium module designs.
The expectation of the project is to enable an increase of solar cell (or module) efficiency of 0.5% absolute versus the reference process with a simultaneous CoO reduction of 20%, due to reduced material costs and increased equipment productivity.
SHINE PV project will demonstrate the integrated innovative processes and novel equipment both virtually and within physical pilots at industrial partners at TRL7. To our knowledge for all these technologies no production equipment is available for HVM worldwide, and we envision a great potential for a PV supply chain revamping in EU.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrymetalloids
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation ActionsCoordinator
W23 Y7X0 Maynooth
Ireland
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Participants (16)
31048 San Bagio Di Callalta
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75015 PARIS 15
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80686 Munchen
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79108 FREIBURG IM BREISGAU
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
3001 Leuven
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92800 PUTEAUX, LA DEFENSE
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8700 LEOBEN
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11415 TALLINN
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3600 GENK
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
75001 PARIS
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
1000 Ljubljana
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38100 Trento
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
10997 Berlin
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
2595 DA Den Haag
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162 00 Prague
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16163 Genova
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Partners (6)
Partner organisations contribute to the implementation of the action, but do not sign the Grant Agreement.
95121 Catania
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Partner organisations contribute to the implementation of the action, but do not sign the Grant Agreement.
2000 Neuchatel
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Partner organisations contribute to the implementation of the action, but do not sign the Grant Agreement.
79111 FREIBURG IM BREISGAU
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Partner organisations contribute to the implementation of the action, but do not sign the Grant Agreement.
78148 Guetenbach
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Partner organisations contribute to the implementation of the action, but do not sign the Grant Agreement.
79395 Neuenburg Am Rhein
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
Partner organisations contribute to the implementation of the action, but do not sign the Grant Agreement.
06766 Bitterfeld Wolfen Ot Thalheim
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