Jiangyin Lightweight Components Company

Jiangyin Lightweight Component Company (Tentative)

Project Name: Key Technology Project for Lightweight Photovoltaic Modules

I. Project Background

The solar photovoltaic industry in China has experienced approximately 20 years of development and is currently experiencing another period of rapid growth. The current industrial development presents new characteristics and trends, with distributed photovoltaics accounting for an increasing share of the market. In 2021, distributed photovoltaics accounted for 53.4% of the domestic market, and in the same period, distributed photovoltaics also exceeded 40% of the global market share.

Distributed photovoltaics include application scenarios such as buildings, public facilities, transportation vehicles, and agriculture and animal husbandry. Traditional glass modules, due to their weight of over 15kg per square meter and lack of flexibility, are difficult to adapt to some application scenarios of distributed photovoltaics that require load-bearing, waterproofing, curved surfaces, and rapid installation (accounting for approximately 40%-50% of the building photovoltaic market). These application scenarios require photovoltaic modules to be easily portable, flexible for folding or rolling, and available in rich and diverse formats, which also require new lightweight flexible modules to meet usage requirements.

Within the next 5 years, China's potential BIPV rooftop application area will reach 1.357 billion square meters, with cumulative installed capacity of 237GW; overseas BIPV/BAPV demand will be no less than 3 billion square meters; taking only 30% requiring lightweight modules as an example, the demand for lightweight front panels will exceed 1.3 billion square meters, approximately 260 million square meters per year. At 40 yuan per square meter, the annual market size reaches 10 billion yuan.

For lightweight flexible modules, there are currently two technical solutions in the market. Route 1 uses transparent backsheet materials (fluorine-containing polymers) or only PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and other transparent plastics as front panels, resulting in low module lifespan (not UV-resistant), only meeting applications within 5 years. Route 2 uses imported fluorine films (ETFE ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene copolymer, PVF polyvinyl fluoride) + FRP (fiberglass panels) as front panels, which have good lifespan but cost far higher than traditional crystalline silicon modules (1.9 yuan/W), lacking market competitiveness. Moreover, for Route 2, the imported transparent fluorine films used for front panels are mainly ETFE and PVF, with main suppliers being American and Japanese companies such as DuPont, Chemours, Asahi Glass, Daikin, and Nitto Denko. ETFE has some domestic production, but PVF film is an exclusive product of American DuPont Company.

This project bypasses DuPont's exclusive extremely difficult PVF film stretching process, adopting a currently domestically innovative PVF coating formula and process to directly form films on FRP (fiberglass panels). While meeting the high weather resistance and high transparency performance requirements of modules, it greatly reduces the cost of lightweight flexible modules. Currently, the core indicators of laboratory small-scale trial products all meet photovoltaic module testing requirements.

Table 1: Comparison of Lightweight Flexible Module Technical Solutions

• High weather-resistant composite front panel is lightweight, thin and flexible, can be rolled to a diameter of less than 10 centimeters, meeting multi-scenario module application and design needs
• Can be embossed with patterns to increase light-trapping effect and improve module yield