Universal statistics of parasitic shunt formation in solar cells, and its implications for cell to module efficiency gap

• DOI: 10.1039/c3ee24167j
• Publication Date: 2013-01-09T20:37:50Z
• Authors: Sourabh Dongaonkar; Stephen Loser; Erik J. Sheets; Katherine Zaunbre...; Rakesh Agrawal; Tobin J. Marks; Muhammad A. Alam
• Keywords: Cadmium telluride photovoltaics

Parasitic shunt formation is an important cause of variability and module efficiency loss in all photovoltaic technologies. In this letter, we quantify the nature four major thin film (TFPV) technologies, namely, amorphous silicon (a-Si:H), organic (OPV), Cu(In,Ga)SSe (CIGS), CdTe. We analyze a wide variety datasets to show that current exhibits robust universal log-normal behavior for these affirm conclusion by rigorous statistical analysis available data. use equivalent circuit simulations quantitatively illustrate importance heavy-tailed distribution towards determining gap between cell efficiency.