Take a COOL Guess – the Fun Quiz on Clean Energy. Today’s Topic: Renewable Energy Claims Verification
Question: Are the manufacturers of renewable energy products at liberty to make any claims they wish, or is there a third-party organization that validates these claims?
Answer: Can be found at Clean Energy Answers.
Relevance: SolarCity claims to have built the world’s most efficient rooftop solar panel, with a module efficiency exceeding 22 percent. If this is true, the new panel would generate more power per square foot and harvest more energy over a year than any other rooftop panel in production, and would be the highest volume solar panel manufactured in the Western Hemisphere.
The 22% you are talking about was reached years ago by SunPower and is back wired
all black.
I think the Solar City panel is very marginally higher in efficiency than commercially available SunPower panels, however of greater interest is the indicated production cost of 55 cents a watt! (Only a little more expensive per watt to produce than 15% to 16% efficient commodity panels)
If they can deliver that whilst saving around a third on balance of system hardware and soft costs (through achieving more with less panels), then they can make a substantial contribution to reducing the cost of solar power.
I look forward to reading the full technical specification, as I suspect they will also have a favourable temperature coefficient, and if they are offered in glass glass bifacial configuration, then they could cut solar power cost even further by using reflected light which strikes the back of the panel (especially useful in car ports and the like where significant amounts of light can get to the back of the panel).