Is there a rapidly emerging quality control issue with the world’s burgeoning supply of solar panels? According to an article published in The New York Times on May 28th this year there have been numerous incidences of solar panel arrays failing, some of them quite drastically so.
There was, for example, the case of a vast array covering a warehouse roof in the Inland Empire region, east of Los Angeles, which had only been installed two years previously yet began to fail due to disintegration of the coating that covered the panels. Other defects in the same array caused a number of fires that took the system offline for two years costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
The NYT article reports that testing laboratories, solar developers, financiers and insurers all over the world have been reporting similar problems indicating a potential quality crisis just as the $77 billion industry is starting to mature. Many of the problems involve Chinese products and according to the NYT even the most reputable Chinese companies have, on occasion, tended to substitute cheaper untested materials as well as subcontracting work to smaller, unreliable, manufacturers.
It would be easy to believe that the solar sector is sitting on a ‘ticking time bomb’, but according to Jenya Meydbray, Chief Executive of PV Evolution Labs based in Berkeley, California, it actually isn’t a pervasive problem in the industry right now.
“There is a large amount of PV manufacturing and there is a lot of movement in Asia where there is also a lot of price pressure resulting in some structuring to cut corners” Mr Meydbray told REM by phone, “but we don’t necessarily see a large problem particularly. Some manufacturers are performing great while others are performing poorly.”
Mr Meydbray told the NYT that “some manufacturers are absolutely swapping in cheap Chinese materials to save money” but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire stock of Chinese panels flooding into the US and Europe, among other locations around the world, should automatically be regarded with suspicion. In fact, most Chinese products are actually very good despite being relatively cheap.
“It’s easy to pick on the Chinese because there are so many Chinese modules out there” Mr Meydbray continues. “The vast majority of modules we test are Chinese manufactured, but we also test many others particularly South Korean panels, which are also pretty good. I think it [the NYT article] paints a gloomier picture than is necessary, it brings up a lot of legitimate points but it’s a bit unbalanced so it’s important to realise we’re not sitting on a ticking time bomb here. I don’t want to pick on the NYT too hard as they do have some legitimate points, but it’s probably not as balanced as it could be. We do vendor quality assessment and project level quality assurance work. On the vendor quality assessment we look at different manufacturers and conduct testing and generally we see very good results. On the project level quality assurance, well that involves a much higher volume and so we do random sampling there. Most of the batches pass okay but some products do fail. It’s mostly to do with quality control issues at manufacturing plants rather than any specific design flaws.”
Meydbray has been keen to calm down fears of an emerging quality control crisis. For example in an article for fellow renewable energy publication Renewable Energy World he reminded readers that “there is a wide spectrum of sophistication, quality and performance when it comes to technology products — from cameras to computers, from mobile phones to motorcycles” and that “solar panels are no different. Based on the hundreds of solar panels that have gone through rigorous reliability testing in our laboratory, the vast majority of modules have proven to perform very well. Solar technology is mature and proven. As the industry rapidly scales up, a greater emphasis is being placed on raw materials and quality control. Fortunately, savvy investors understand that a few quality issues in a nascent industry that’s growing at double digit rates does not represent the broader technology or investment opportunity. Every company and industry experiences quality problems. That’s why there are vehicle testing labs and crash test dummies. We’ve seen numerous car recalls, and most recently, compromised bolts on the San Francisco Bay Area’s new Bay Bridge. Should we stop building cars and bridges?”
Even the odd solar array catching fire is not unprecedented Mr Meydbray tells REM.
“There’s a lot of high power circuitry running through these things but we at PV Evolution do screen for such defects. There’s the scale of the industry to bear in mind and the number of institutional players getting involved in it. The message I would like to leave you with is that the industry is actually doing really well, there will always be a few problems but generally they are not that pervasive.”
As with every other technology there are indeed technical risks, but overall the solar PV sector is doing very well to mitigate the risks. The key to resolving issues where they are likely to emerge is to ensure that comprehensive quality control procedures are in place with stringent quality assurance objectives that are increasingly improved and perfected as the industry moves forward.
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