pv magazine Test: February 2025 Results
By George Touloupas and Huatian Xu
This article was originally published in pv magazine – April 2025 edition. Learn more about the pv magazine test here.
George Touloupas, vice president of ESG and new services at Clean Energy Associates, and Huatian Xu, director of technology and quality, analyze the February 2025 results from the pv magazine outdoor test installation in Yinchuan, China.
At the end of February 2025, three new samples - two tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) samples from SEG Solar and Astronergy and our first n-type back contact sample from Aiko – arrived in Yinchuan and were installed at the beginning of March. The outdoor data for these will be published next month.
As all samples are now bifacial n-type products, we have 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 PERC bifacial modules.
Figure 1: Daily temperature and irradiance data - February 2025
Monthly highlight
We have recently observed that the modules with large cell sizes underperformed. Our initial investigation found an average temperature gap of 1.5 C compared to modules with smaller cells, partially explaining the underperformance. Upon further investigation, we identified certain inefficiencies in the operation of the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) that disadvantaged modules with larger cells and lower voltage. The results of this month have been normalized to account for the MPPT discrepancies, and this can be observed in the reduction of the ranks from 3 to 2.
Table 1: Specific energy yield ranking January to February 2025
Figure 2: Specific energy yield of N-type bifacial (TOPCon & HJT) modules for February 2025
Test partnership
pv magazine test is expanding to the Middle East in 2025. With testing and inspection services provider Gulf Renewable Energy Lab, we have added a new outdoor testing site in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, and will be monitoring the latest PV module technologies performance in this harsh desert climate, as well as at the existing test installation in Yinchuan, China. pv magazine Publisher Eckhart Gouras confirmed the agreement with Gulf Renewable Energy Lab General Manager for TIC Services Mohammed Alghamdi at the SunRise Arabia Clean Energy Conference hosted by pv magazine and Solarabic in Riyadh in February 2025.
The pv magazine outdoor test installation is hosted at the CPVT test site in Yinchuan, China.
