The age of the large-format module

In 2019, an interesting trend started to appear in the PV market; the increase in module peak power was not being driven by improved cell efficiencies, but instead by making the PV modules bigger. Over the course of 2019 and 2020 modules of over 400 W started to appear, with some astonishing powers being announced by module manufacturers. Now we’re seeing very dramatic increases in power being brought about simply by having larger module sizes. It is tempting to look at this trend and think that there is nothing really innovative about it – haven’t module manufacturers essentially just stuck two modules together? But none of this could have happened without some important technological advances that happened previously, what we are seeing in the market right now is a phase of permanent readjustment to module sizes that simply wasn’t possible before. In particular, split-cell, multi-busbar and dense interconnection strategies have opened the doors to numerous possibilities of connecting cells together in a PV module, which has led to the baffling range of modules now available in the market. The use of these large format modules allows for some important cost savings on the module itself, since one large module uses less metal framing than 2 smaller modules. There are important balance of system savings too when building utility scale PV plants. Although this phase of readjustment is disruptive, there are signs that the market will start to consolidate around a couple of new ‘standard’ module sizes for utility plants. These new modules are being rapidly adopted into new PV plant designs, so the large-scale format is definitely here to stay.