AMPERE project

 

Summer 2019


By 2030 the European Union will have to cover 27% of final energy consumption with renewable sources. In this context the AMPERE project (Automated photovoltaic cell and Module industrial Production to regain and secure European Renewable Energy market) has been conceived.

Funded by the European Program H2020 with almost 15 million euro, for a total value of over 26 million euro, AMPERE aims to develop an innovative technological solution to support the competitiveness of the European photovoltaic industry and regain market shares.

Coordinated by the Italian company Enel Green Power, this international project involves 15 partners among scientific institutes and companies from 7 European countries, all with a unique worldwide experience.

AMPERE will develop a fully automated pilot line for the production of photovoltaic modules with an innovative high-efficiency: the bifacial heterojunction (HJT) module solution that provides the coupling between crystalline silicon and amorphous silicon to guarantee high performance in terms of efficiency conversion and energy productivity.

In more detail, the technical objectives of the project AMPERE will involve the production of 72-cell photovoltaic modules with over 400 watt peak power and a cell conversion efficiency of over 23%.

AMPERE aims to demonstrate the low-cost potential of innovative manufacturing approaches, deriving from low solar electricity generation costs thanks to intrinsic high efficiency and bifaciality of the HJT technology. AMPERE will contribute towards solving the global climate challenge by developing PV modules that are more efficient, have a longer life time and more reliability.

The main result of the project is the setting-up of a 200 MW fullscale automated pilot line in a production environment at the Enel Green Power’s 3Sun Fab, while also preparing the next steps to a GW scale plant in Europe. Another notable key exploitable result is the LCOE reduction target of at least 15% compared to conventional PV mc-SI technology. This reduction will be achieved thanks to the intrinsic specificities of the HJT technology (low cost process, high efficiency and low temperature coefficient) and the process evolutions introduced in the project.

A major project outcome is to demonstrate the financial sustainability of PV Manufacturing plants in Europe by studying the possibility of building a big Giga fab manufacturing plant in Europe. The viability of the technology in terms of throughput, reliability, costs, efficiency, and in terms of project bankability will be demonstrated as one of the main project outputs and it will show the potential for cost and performance competitiveness of the final product.

Moreover, leveraging on the project results would be a significant achievement and will influence the PV market metric to shift from Module cost focus (cost of production of each module kWp) to LCOE, levelized cost of electricity focus (cost of generation of 1 kWh of electricity). The technology will also have strong upstream (materials and equipments) and downstream (BOS, installation, utilities, etc.) impacts on the European market. The results coming from the development of preliminary business plans for Industrial actors, technology providers and end-users, demonstrate that strong growth of the PV manufacturing sector in Europe is possible within the next few years.


Contact details:
Website: www.ampere-h2020.eu


The project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 745601