Since co-founding ISC Konstanz in the mid-2000s, Kopecek has never been one to shy away from making assertions about the future direction of PV technology. Back in 2012, for example, few shared his belief, frequently expounded in this publication and our sister journal, Photovoltaics International, that bifacial technology was the way forward for solar PV, offering huge scope for driving down the levelised cost of solar power.
Since that time, Kopecek has been the driving force behind the Bifi Workshop, a technical conference series that, as the name suggests, was first conceived to offer others in the bifacial community a platform for discussing a technology that the naysayers believed would never take off.
“When we started with the bifacial workshop in 2012, nobody believed in bifaciality because aluminium back surface field [the prevailing technology at the time] was not bifacial,” Kopecek explains. “But we said, the next step is PERC, and this will be bifacial.”
Despite their confidence in the technology, Kopecek and the other bifacial believers still faced “many hurdles” in bringing the technology into the market. “It wasn’t only the technology change, but you also have to convince PVsyst [the PV simulation software platform] to implement bifacial function into the simulations, and they were not interested because they said there is no bifacial market, why should we do that? So this was the first chicken and egg.”
Twelve years on, the bifacial argument has been conclusively won. But the BiFi Workshop is still going strong, having apparently lost none of its vigour despite the ubiquity of the technology it first championed.
Next week, the event travels to Zhuhai, China, for its second leg of the year. Under discussion will be bifacial back contact technology, which Kopecek insists will be the ultimate evolution of c-Si technology.
As before with bifaciality, the industry is split in its belief in the extent to which back contact will become a dominant technology in the future. “There are still people that that do not believe that IBC will come on utility-scale, and that will be the major topic of the workshop: that if IBC will come on the utility-scale, of course, it has to become bifacial as well, because you cannot have a utility-scale PV system without bifaciality anymore,” Kopecek explains.
He says the workshop will begin with a discussion between “IBC believers and IBC doubters” on the question of “will bifacial IBC really enter the utility-scale or not”.
“I will have a strong opinion that it’s clear that it will happen,” Kopecek laughs. “But also, there will be some people who say, ah, we still have some doubts, because this depends on the timeline of tandem [perovskite], and then maybe two-terminal tandem. But the major topic of the workshop will be to show the progress of IBC technology and how we have made it in the last years to be more efficient and lower cost.”
On this,