The objective of the project PECSYS is the demonstration of a system for the solar driven electrochemical hydrogen generation with an area >10 m². The efficiency of the system will be >6% and it will operate for six month showing a degradation below 100 cm²) and will be subject to extensive stability optimization. Especially, the use of innovative ALD based metal oxide sealing layers will be studied. The devices will have the great advantage compared to decoupled systems that they will have reduced Ohmic transport losses. Another advantage for application in sunny, hot regions will be that these devices have a positive temperature coefficient, because the improvements of the electrochemical processes overcompensate the reduced PV conversion efficiency. With these results, an in-depth socio-techno-economic model will be developed to predict the levelized cost of hydrogen production, which will be below 5€/Kg Hydrogen in locations with high solar irradiation, as preliminary back of the envelope calculations have revealed. Based on these findings, the most promising technologies will be scaled to module size. The final system will consist of several planar modules and will be placed in Jülich. No concentration or solar tracking will be necessary and therefore the investment costs will be low. It will have an active area >10 m² and will produce more than 10 Kg of hydrogen over six month period.

Scenarios have forecasted a long lasting amplification with PV electricity becoming the cheapest electricity source in many regions with costs in the range of 4 to 6 c€/kWh for EU by 2024, while 2.2 c€/kWh has been achieved for a 800 MW PV plant planned in Abu Dhabi for 2019. The PV market will continue to expand in the coming years with more than a doubling in the production capacity expected for 2024. At the same time investment in production capacities is foreseen to keep growing hence maintaining the sector highly competitive. For the European PV industry, which is struggling to survive after years of massive investments in China and south-east Asia, the growth of the market represents a chance to come back as a prime player on high-efficiency premium technologies. This is the positioning of GOPV to develop highly competitive technologies for the PV utility market and strong synergies between European players. The project will accelerate reduction of electricity cost implementing advanced PV features and creating synergies across 5 topic areas: Light Management; Energy Efficiency; Material Efficiency; System Reliability; and System configuration and O&M. Ultimately, it will set up an integrated 500 kW PV system to demonstrate a competitive electricity cost of 0.02 €/kWh for irradiation levels of 1900 kWh/m²/year GHI in Southern Europe. The levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) will hence be reduced by 50% (currently 0,04 €/kWh) and the energy payback time reduced by 40%, both in respect to actual standard solution and to PERC best in class mono-facial solution. GOPV project will deliver a 35 years lifetime for the PV string instead of 25 years standards. Beyond GOPV, the global turnover for the six industrial partners exploiting the results of the project will be close to 48 M€ (2022) and will reach 680 M€ in 2027 (x 14 compare to 2020) with an expectation of creating more than 2000 jobs on the 2022-27 period.

Today’s world PV market is dominated by standard crystalline solar cells (so-called Al-BSF cells) and part of the market is shifting to PERC solar cells. The shift is obtained by introducing three additional process steps to the standard process (rear side cleaning, passivation and laser opening), and allows a gain of typically 1% absolute in efficiency. Next generation c-Si technologies should feature higher voltage solar cells with higher efficiency and less processing steps in the manufacturing, allowing for further cost reduction, both at the PV panel level and for the final cost of solar electricity. AMPERE focuses on technologies with such a potential and capitalizes on the high tech investments made in Europe over the last decade for establishing advanced manufacturing processes for crystalline silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells and modules, on the development of hardware capable of coating at high speed and low cost homogeneous materials of high electronic quality. It also bases on the unique expertise gained in production of thin film modules, and in all hardware issues related to large area coatings in production environment, which can applied for the production of SHJ cells and modules. The final goal of the project is t the setting-up of a 100 MW full-scale automated pilot line in production environment at the 3Sun fab, while preparing the next steps to 300 MW and GW scale. The project will operate with the support of full technology platforms for solar cells at CEA and the platform for advanced module technologies at MBS. It will demonstrate practically the ultra-low cost potential of such manufacturing approaches, as well as the even more impressively low solar electricity generation costs thanks to high efficiency and/or intrinsic bifaciality of the selected technologies.