Proceedings of the 20th Euorpean Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition

The SLIVER cell and module technologyis aninnovative concept for silicon solar cell and PV module manufacturing, recently invented by researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) under funding from Origin Energy. This new ,PV technology has ,been transferred from a university laboratory (ANU) to a ,new ,pilot manufacturing facility. The first SLIVER cells and modules from pre-production have demonstrated excellent results interms of performance and reliability, as well as great tolerance to partial shadowing and lower operating temperature. Keywords: c-Si, Si-Films, Cost reduction 1 SLIVER CELL AND MODULE TECHNOLOGY ,The new ,SLIVER technology was ,recently invented,by researchers at ,the ,Australian National University (ANU) [1,2] as an answer to one the most urgent challenges that the PV industry is facing at the present time, namely the rising cost of polysilicon feedstock [3]. Despite a large increase in ,the volume of manufacturing,of PV modules,and the great economy of scale that it generated during the last few years,we have to,recognize ,that ,the ,cost ,of solar ,PV module manufacturing has not decreased as much as expected [5].The cost of the crystalline silicon PV modules, which represents more than 90% of the global PV production, is still largely dominated by material cost, particularly the cost of the,mono- or multicrystalline silicon wafers. The major ,challenge ,for ,the ,crystalline silicon ,PV technologies is that the increase in the price of the silico