The Cold, Hard Truth About Soldering Defects

By Paul Wormser and Jake Edie

This article was originally published in PV Tech.

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Cold soldering defects in a PV module. The problem has now become the most commonly found defect in pre-shipping module inspections.

The electric grid is complex. For many generation technologies, the complexity lies in their sophistication. Gigawatt-scale nuclear and coal plants are inherently complicated, requiring a large on-site staff of technicians and engineers to ensure safe and efficient operations. In solar, the complexity lies elsewhere. The basic construction of a solar panel is relatively simple compared to a nuclear plant. The trick in solar is to get everything exactly and precisely right – specifications, manufacturing, transportation, and installation – over and over again. For example, a typical 200MW solar plant constructed with 600W modules requires 333,000 modules.

Significant attention has appropriately been paid to big technological changes in the solar industry, including the move to bifacial cells, the switch from PERC to TOPCon and the relentless increase in module wattage. But there is a much less visible, and less discussed, change that has improved the current collection in each cell but made the required precision of the manufacturing process more stringent.

Read the full article here.

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Paul Wormser is the Vice President of Technology, and Jake Edie is the Vice President of Marketing.

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