Efficiency, yield, cost, and N-type solar module cells have more room for efficiency improvement and cost reduction. The recent surge in raw materials will accelerate the transformation to N-type solar module cells. The critical time for P-type production lines to switch to N-type solar module cells has come.

First of all, why do you want to do N-type? The trend of component evolution and development, in short, is nothing more than the climb of power, and the traceability is directly linked to the efficiency of the cell. At present, the 23.38% conversion efficiency of Jinko's monocrystalline PERC cells has gradually approached its own efficiency limit (24.5%). On this basis, a major breakthrough in power can only be started from the cell size and module version. This will undoubtedly bring huge pressure on operation and maintenance costs and the matching of bracket inverters. The efficiency limit of N-type TOPCon cells is much higher than that of PERC cells (28.2%~28.7%). In addition to high conversion efficiency, N-type cells also have the advantages of high bifacial ratio, low temperature coefficient, no light decay, good low-light effect, and longer carrier life. In the long run, it has an absolute cost-effectiveness advantage. It can be said that the rise of N-type technology is an inevitable trend in the future.

At present, N-type solar panel cells technology mainly includes TOPCon, HJT and IBC. JinkoSolar Vice President Qian Jing attended the 2nd "Belt and Road" Energy Ministers' Meeting recently. In the topic of "How the Next Generation Leading Photovoltaic Technology Can Promote the Energy Transformation of the Belt and Road", he discussed the efficiency, cost and process from various perspectives. Compare these three processes:

1) From the perspective of efficiency, the ultimate theoretical efficiency of TOPCon cells reaches 28.7%, which is higher than 27.5% of HJT and 24.5% of PERC. Judging from the current mass production efficiency, Jinko's latest TOPCon world record efficiency reaches 25.4%, and the mass production line efficiency exceeds 24%. Even so, there is still a certain gap from the limit efficiency, and there is still a lot of room for efficiency improvement;

2) From a process point of view, both TOPCon and HJT achieve power enhancement through passivation, but the former is through the tunnel oxide layer, and the HJT is through the deposition of amorphous silicon films. TOPCon needs to increase diffusion, etching and deposition equipment transformation in the PERC production line, and the cost increase is small; while the HJT cell process is the simplest and has the fewest steps (4 to 7 steps in the core process), but basically all the PERC production lines are replaced.

3) From the perspective of cost, the direct result of different processes is an increase in equipment cost of 240-400 million yuan/GW. The difference in the consumption of silver paste, based on the current data, the consumption of silver paste of HJT solar panel cells is about twice that of TOPCon, and this rate will not be flattened in the short term. The difference in process leads to the difference in the commercialization cost of the two (about 0.3 RMB/W). With the increase in the cost of silver paste, the difference may be more than 0.3 RMB/W.