Welcome to the second edition of the NextBase project newsletter.
The NextBase project has entered its 15th month. Three general assembly (GA) meetings have taken place so far: The kick-off meeting at IMEC in Leuven in November 2016, the second GA at FZU in Prague in May 2017, and the third GA at EFPL/CSEM in October 2017. The project is currently proceeding according to schedule. The highest solar cell efficiency achieved on an interdigitated back contacted (IBC) silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cell in this project is 23.9% based on the tunnel-IBC concept by EPFL/CSEM. MBR is transferring this concept into its tooling development for industrial deposition of IBC-SHJ. With the record efficiency of IBC-SHJ reaching 26.6%, as demonstrated by Kaneka Corporation, there is no doubt that IBC-SHJ is the most promising crystalline silicon solar cell concept available. Its industrialization requisites low cost production, which is among others targeted by the NextBase project. We are looking forward to the year 2018 of the NextBase project, where successful developments of materials and processes within the project will be integrated into one IBC-SHJ to further boost the efficiency on both cell and module level.
In addition, the NextBase project supported two summer schools: The 1st PhotoVoltaic Systems Summer School (PVSSS 2017) organized by TUD in Delft in July 2017 and the international summer school on Physics at Nanoscale organized by FZU in Devet Skal in June 2017.
Finally a big thanks to all partners and especially to the work package leaders for the successful collaboration so far.
