Journal
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
Volume 6, Issue 3, Pages 782-787Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c3ee24167j
Keywords
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Funding
- SRC-ERI
- Network for Photovoltaic Technology (NPT) [204900]
- ANSER Center
- EFR Center
- US DOE, Office of Science [SC0001059]
- Solar Economy IGERT [0903670-DGE]
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Parasitic shunt formation is an important cause of variability and module efficiency loss in all photovoltaic technologies. In this letter, we quantify the nature of this shunt variability in four major thin film photovoltaic (TFPV) technologies, namely, amorphous silicon (a-Si:H), organic (OPV), Cu(In,Ga)SSe (CIGS), and CdTe. We analyze a wide variety of datasets to show that the shunt current exhibits a robust universal log-normal behavior for all these technologies. We affirm this conclusion by rigorous statistical analysis of the available data. We use equivalent circuit simulations to quantitatively illustrate the importance of this heavy-tailed distribution towards determining the universal gap between cell and module efficiency.
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