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