SolarCity Rooftop Solar Panel’s Efficiency Exceeds 22%

“The breakthrough here is high efficiency at a lower cost”, said SolarCity Chief Technology Officer Peter Rive in an interview.

At an event Friday morning in New York, SolarCity will lay claim to one of the solar manufacturing world’s top titles – Most Efficient Rooftop Panel on Earth. The efficiency of SolarCity’s panels was deteremined by the Renewable Energy Test Center, a third-party testing firm.

The panels are the same size as traditional panels, but, according to SolarCity, produce 30-to-40% more power.

SolarCity also claims its panels don’t suffer efficiency losses due to increases in temperature to the degree that other panels do.

The move is aimed at helping SolarCity company keep solar power cost effective even after a federal tax credit expires next year, Rive said.

“That’s been the singular focus of the company… to continue to get the costs down”, Rive said.

SolarCity’s efficiency leap, however, may not be that big when compared to the current state of the art.

SolarCity’s new gear comes from the company’s 2014 purchase of Silevo, a startup with a streamlined process for making high-efficiency cells. It shows us that while panel technology is improving at a dramatic rate, it’s also an absolute necessity for the longer-term business model that residential solar companies depend on. “Not sure what they would be comparing it to”.

“It’s a world record for a rooftop panel”, said Jonathan Bass, a SolarCity spokesman.

Farrell does agree that heat management is an issue worth tackling.

Over that time, numerous companies have failed at manufacturing new types of solar panels. “So I’m not surprised that’s one of the things they work on”, said Farrell.

SolarCity’s 1 GW solar panel manufacturing facility in Buffalo, N.Y., is expected to open in early 2017. The efficiency rating refers to the proportion of the sun’s energy a module converts into electricity.

Limited production is set to start this month, but the plan is to start building 360 watt panels at SolarCity’s new 1-gigawatt plant opening in New York next year.