SHINE PV

Sustainable, High-throughput, Industry-ready, Next-generation technology for European manufacturing leadership in PV

SHINE PV is an EU-funded project that aims at developing alternative technological routes to mainstream advanced photovoltaic (PV) production at lower costs and create opportunities for the differentiation of EU manufacturers (cells, modules, equipment and materials) to enhance their competitiveness on the global PV market. 

 SHINE PV will develop alternative technological routes to PV production for Silicon Heterojunction and TOPCon solar cells, covering the three key steps in the back-end manufacturing: metallization, post-processing and interconnection. SHINE PV will demonstrate different flows and down-select the most promising ones in terms of cost of ownership and high volume manufacturing readiness. Advanced equipment at TRL7 with Industry 4.0 dedicated features, innovative materials and solutions will be developed. For the metallization, SHINE PV will introduce parallel dispensing and plating as High Volume Manufacturing (HVM) alternative processes to incumbent screen printing, with the objective of demonstrating the complete or partial replacement of Ag with Cu, a fundamental step to enable Tera-Watt scale production levels. Moreover, SHINE PV will increase the efficiency through cell post-processing by applying Light Soaking process in HVM and recover the cutting-induced losses by Edge Re-Passivation. 

 For the module making step, the innovations in interconnection proposed are Twill and Shingling processes and HVM equipment. Both will leverage on the optimization of the metallization and post-processing steps and will demonstrate their potential in terms of superior electrical properties, aesthetics, reliability, and compatibility with premium module designs. The expectation of the project is to enable an increase of solar cell (or module) efficiency of 0.5% absolute versus the reference process with a simultaneous CoO reduction of 20%, due to reduced material costs and increased equipment productivity.  

SHINE PV project will demonstrate the integrated innovative processes and novel equipment both virtually and within physical pilots at industrial partners at TRL7. To our knowledge for all these technologies no production equipment is available for HVM worldwide, and we envision a great potential for a PV supply chain revamping in EU. 

AMIRES was involved in the preparatory phase and negotiations. Additionally, AMIRES is responsible for administrative project management and for communication and dissemination activities.

• Project partners:

• • Applied Materials Ireland Limited, Ireland  

• • Applied Materials Italia srl, Italy 

• • Commissariat a l Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives, France 

• • Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Angewandten Forschung EV, Germany 

• • Highline Technology GmbH, Germany 

• • Interuniversitair Micro-Electronica Centrum, Belgium 

• • Arkema France SA, France 

• • Polymer Competence Center Leoben GmbH, Austria 

• • IPTE Automation OÜ, Estonia 

• • Soltech, Belgium 

• • HoloSolis, France 

• • Univerza v Ljubljani, Slovenia  

• • EnginSoft Spa, Italy 

• • PI Photovoltaik-Institut Berlin AG, Germany 

• • Nederlandse Organisatie voor toegepast-natuurwetenschappelijk onderzoek, Netherlands  

• • AMIRES, the Business Innovation Management Institute z.ú., Czechia  

• • Bedimensional SPA, Italy 

• • 3SUN s.r.l., Italy 

• • Centre suisse d’électronique et de microtechnique SA – Recherche et Developpement, Switzerland  

• • M10 Industries AG, Germany 

• • RENA Technologies GmbH, Germany 

• • Plasma Electronic Gmbh, Germany 

• • Hanwha Q CELLS GmbH, Germany

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101172902