pv magazine Test: March 2025 Results
By George Touloupas and Huatian Xu
This article was originally published in pv magazine – May 2025 edition. Learn more about the pv magazine test here.
George Touloupas, Vice President for ESG and New Services at Clean Energy Associates (CEA), and Huatian Xu, CEA’s Director of Technology and Quality, break down the March 2025 performance results from pv magazine’s outdoor PV test site in Yinchuan, China.
SEG Solar and Astronergy supplied new tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) modules, alongside an n-type back-contact sample from Aiko, for installation in the first week of March 2025. To add these new products to the comparison table in these results, we removed the production data from before March 7. Due to downtime for system upgrades, we also did not capture data for three days in March and therefore had to remove those days from the total energy yield calculation. Finally, three products using 210 mm square cells were removed from the data, as we identified anomalies in the production figures caused by the maximum power point tracking algorithm. The data from those products will be reported again as soon as the issues are resolved.
Figure 1: Daily temperature and irradiance data - March 2025
Monthly highlights
Aiko’s n-type back-contact product took second place, according to energy yield criteria. That may be due to the bifaciality factor of this module being about 70%, whereas front-contact, bifacial TOPCon modules have 80% bifaciality. On the other hand, the back contact module has a better temperature coefficient, which reduced thermal losses. The impact of those parameters on the energy yield depends strongly on site and climate specifics and would change in different locations and system configurations.
As all samples are now bifacial n-type products, we have stopped calculating the bifacial boost with respect to the monofacial product baseline. We are working with our partners to introduce a new baseline based on the energy yield of reference PERC bifacial modules.
Table 1: Specific energy yield ranking February to March 2025
Figure 2: Specific energy yield of N-type bifacial (TOPCon & HJT) modules for March 2025
pv mag test program
