Assessing the Competitiveness of Metallization Cell Schemes with a Future-Cost Uncertainty Model

Technology innovation and successful market introduction and impact carries the risk that future market conditions may not be as predicted. For PV technologies, the future industry cost of manufacture has been demonstrably hard to foresee, which can result in a poor assessment of the future competitiveness of a technology in development today. Future projections of PV cell and module manufacturing cost will always have significant uncertainty and this is not quantified in standard bottom-up cost-of-ownership calculations. To address this, we have built a Monte-Carlo based cost-of-ownership model to simulate reasonable future scenarios of manufacturing cost for c-Si cells and modules [1]. In this contribution, we analyze the cost/benefit of high-efficiency cell technology as a function of Ag usage, Ag cost, and manufacturing location. We find that at current and most likely future Ag costs, a high efficiency cell technology like silicon heterojunction (SHJ) with higher Ag usage will be more economically competitive in both Europe and China in the future. However, in Europe the SHJ benefit is less sensitive to changes in Ag cost and higher efficiency cells should be more competitive in higher labour cost locations.