pv magazine test: December 2024 and January 2025 Results
By George Touloupas
This article was originally published in pv magazine – March 2025 edition. Learn more about the pv magazine test here.
As pv magazine test settles into its new home in Yinchuan, China, George Touloupas – Vice President for ESG and New Services at Clean Energy Associates – analyzes the first set of monthly outdoor results.
The new outdoor test field in Yinchuan, China, began operations on Dec. 9, 2024. Due to system modifications, the data of Dec. 23 were removed. In January, we were close to getting a full month’s worth of data, but unfortunately, due to an operational error, we lost data for several modules after Jan. 24. At present, this problem has been solved and we expect that a full month’s data will be presented in the next issue of pv magazine.
As all current samples are bifacial n-type products, we stopped calculating the bifacial boost with respect to the monofacial product baseline. We are working with our partners to introduce a new baseline based on the energy yield of reference passivated emitter rear cell (PERC) bifacial modules.
In the past two months, we found that some samples with larger cell sizes underperformed. Upon examining the module operation temperature in conjunction with irradiation effects, we discovered that the irradiance-weighted operating temperature gap between samples averaged around 1.5 C. Due to the influence of the module temperature coefficient, the resulting power generation gap due to the temperature disparity reached up to 0.4%, which has affected the ranking of several samples.
Figure 1: Daily temperature and irradiance data - December 2024 and January 2025
Table 1: Specific energy yield ranking December 2024 to January 2025
Figure 2: Specific energy yield of monofacial modules for December 2024
Figure 3: Specific energy yield of monofacial modules for January 2025
The new pv magazine outdoor test installation is now hosted at the CPVT test site in Yinchuan, China.
George Touloupas is the Vice President of ESG and New Services at Clean Energy Associates. He leads projects centered on developing CEA’s internal quality standards, researching new production technologies, and developing new services. George has an extensive background in PV manufacturing, as well as downstream experience, working among others, prior to joining CEA, as the Chief Operating & Technical Officer at Philadelphia Solar in Jordan and Technical & Operations Director at Recom.
