The solar panel’s energy transition is a global fact and the use of photovoltaic solar panels for photovoltaic self-consumption or generating electricity for sale to the grid, all from solar energy, will play a decisive role in this transition.
Imagine that you are thinking of setting up a photovoltaic self-consumption installation with solar panels for electricity to save on your home, or for your business.
In fact, it is one of the greatest advantages of solar energy, taking advantage of that space that we do not use (the roof) to generate electricity with solar energy and save on the electricity bill.
What LG does in its Neon solar panels
But you have realized that you do not have much free space on the roof of your house, or you want to install as much power as possible to optimize the generation of energy from the surface of your roof,
Roof or you simply want solar panels of the highest possible quality. to avoid future problems.
In those cases, you have to look for the most efficient solar panels that exist on the market in order to make the most of the available space on your roof, your house, or your warehouse….
So you need to know which solar panels are the best. more efficient at all times.
The efficiency of Solar Panels:
You should know that of all the types of solar panels that exist, the ones with the highest efficiency and performance are those that use monocrystalline technology or, at least, are based on monocrystalline.
What it means is that you will be able to install more power on your roof in the same space than if you used other solar panels with less efficiency.
In the end, it is to make an account of how many Watts per square meter those solar panels have.
The higher the efficiency, the more watts per square meter.
And it is also true that the most efficient solar panels are, coincidentally, the highest quality there is.
Currently, specifically, it would be the LG Neon solar panels, the SunPower MAX3, MAX2, and P3, and the FuturaSun Zebra, as the winners. But we will see later.
It is very common, more than desirable, today to find projects, tenders, and offers… that speak of solar panels with 16-17% efficiency as high-efficiency panels, which is wrong.
Neon solar panels
The efficiency of a solar panel of 16-17% is something standard, it does not mean that it is neither good nor bad, it is simply something standard.
But what it certainly isn’t is high efficiency.
Solar panels’ high efficiency might be regarded as beginning at 19%.
It is also true that today, you can find many articles on the internet that talk about the efficiency of solar panels, but after having reviewed many of them,
We have to say that most of them are incorrect.
Some are out of date and many others are simply fakes that are only looking for commercial promotion.
Outdated articles are why you should understand that solar cells progressively improve their efficiency year after year, so solar panels with an efficiency X, probably in 1 or 2 years will have improved.
As a result, rankings of the most effective solar panels need to be revised at least annually.
solar panels
The others, the articles that are false, fall under their own weight. You will recognize why they usually talk about Chinese brands,
Why do they show prices and why they do not provide any document that shows that, indeed, this efficiency is real and is superior to other panels? It is pure commercial disinformation and without any rigor.
Well, in this article we are going to show what the 10 most efficient solar panels that exist in the photovoltaic market really are.
Technologies and efficiency of Solar Panels:
As you well know, in the photovoltaic sector there are 2 technologies that predominate, which are Monocrystalline and Polycrystalline. Well, but within the Monocrystalline there are in turn variations of technology, some conventional such as PERC panels, and PERT.
Exclusive ones such as Panasonic’s HIT, Meyer Burger’s HJT, and SunPower’s IBC (Maxeon).
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 each of the Solar Panels Colorado Springs is reaching based on its 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 (High Purity Monocrystalline).
On the Y axis on the right, you can see the cell efficiency in each case. Eye, cell efficiency, not panel (always something less).
The standard power of the technology is displayed in the green bars along with the associated efficiency.
That is, for example, for the P-Mono PERC (PERC Technology ), the standard is 300W with a cell (not panel) efficiency of 21.4%.
What LG does in its Neon solar panels
As you can see, it is very illustrative that the most efficient solar panels that exist are those that incorporate monocrystalline HIT and IBC technologies, which use N-type silicon. That is, fundamentally Panasonic and SunPower.
Somewhat further 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.
Polycrystalline
As an aside, mention that the panels that use type N silicon are of a much higher quality than the rest because this 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 for this reason, 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 it comes to panel efficiency.
Table of the 10 most efficient Solar Panels that exist in the photovoltaic market:
Once the issue of the efficiencies of each technology has been clarified, we show the list of the solar panels that have the highest efficiency in the current photovoltaic sector.
This would be an updated version as of March 2019 with the highest efficiency solar panels that exist in the current photovoltaic market.
All of them are verifiable and verifiable as some of the best solar panels on the market, you can simply search the website of each manufacturer, and the technical sheet of each of those panels, and see where they indicate the efficiency of each of those models.
All of them are verifiable and verifiable
Then it is up to each one to decide if the price of solar panels compensates for the difference in efficiency compared to other less efficient ones or not.
We maintain that if it compensates for the fact that the performance over 25 – 30 years will be higher, and then there are the cases in which there is little space and it is necessary to maximize the installed power that there is no other choice but to resort to these “super panels “.
In this article we have not taken bifacial solar panels into consideration, for a reason:
Since it is a relatively new type of panel, there is currently no accurate information on how much more it produces on its back face. In actuality, it is impossible to know.
On the other hand, the aforementioned modern bifacial panels have a number of issues with the shadows that the panel’s parts cast on the cell’s back.
such as the connection box, the cables, and even the frames of the panel, which in the long run can cause hot spots. Solar farms are a good option, but for a house, in most cases, they are not.
But let’s delve a little deeper into the two leaders in efficiency that exist in the market, we refer to LG and SunPower solar panels.
Efficiency and durability:
It should go without saying that a solar panel’s efficiency on the first day it is installed is of little genuine worth if it cannot last for at least 30 or 40 years.
What does this mean?:
At present, the use of half cells is very common, which has many advantages (better behavior in the shade, for example), but implies a high potential for breakdowns, due to the use of soldiers and bus bars.
due to the use of technology based on bus bars and welding, has burns (hot spots), so what in principle could be a high-voltage solar panel efficiency, in the long run, it is not.
LG Neon Solar Panels:
As can be seen in the table above, after SunPower, LG solar panels, specifically the Neon models, are the second largest solar panels in terms of efficiency.
To understand how it achieves this high efficiency, it is best to see the diagram of how the solar cell used in LG Neon solar panels works :
What LG does in its Neon solar panels
The key is in what you can see in the image above. What LG does in its Neon solar panels is to place the Bus Bars (those metal strips that go through conventional cells) on the back of the cell.
Best What LG does in its Neon solar panels
It is a more expensive technology than the conventional one but with much greater reliability.
One more step would be to eliminate those Bus Bars since they are always a source of problems in solar panel installations.
In fact, the English laboratory, after examining thousands of photovoltaic installations, determined that the most frequent problem found was corrosion and,
On the other hand, that is caused by bus bars and metallic connections between cells.