pv magazine Test: May and June 2025 Results
By George Touloupas and Huatian Xu
This article was originally published in pv magazine – July & August 2025 edition. Learn more about the pv magazine test here.
George Touloupas, Vice President of ESG and New Services at Clean Energy Associates (CEA), and Huatian Xu, CEA’s Director of Technology and Quality, analyze the May and June 2025 results from the pv magazine test outdoor installation in Yinchuan, China.
Due to a monitoring system malfunction we did not acquire data from May 21 to 24, or on June 26. As the AE Solar product was installed in the first week of June, we decided to remove four days of June data to comparatively assess its performance. All three 210 mm products are now being reported after resolving earlier maximum power point discrepancies. We look forward to more suppliers joining the test in Yinchuan and at the new site in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, from where we will report initial results in next month’s edition.
Figure 1: Daily temperature and irradiance data - May and June 2025
Monthly highlight
The new AE Solar product climbed to the top, which is something we have observed frequently with newly installed products. Other products lost their top rank in the meantime, possibly due to seasonal performance differences or more permanent causes, which can be assessed after a full year of operation.
This is the third month that we are publishing the new index on energy production per unit of module surface area (kWh/m2). We can observe that certain products with larger cell sizes have high energy production per unit of module surface area, although they do not perform as well in the standard specific energy yield index.
Further observation and comparison of data of more high-efficiency products is needed to draw more detailed conclusions. As all samples now are bifacial n-type products, we 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 May to June 2025
Figure 2: Specific energy yield of monofacial modules for May and June 2025
The Yangtze Institute for Solar Technology hosts the pv magazine test outdoor installation at its test field in Yinchuan, China.
