In general, although it is generally optimistic in the industry, HJT still needs a more mature production process and a better cost reduction route to achieve large-scale commercialization as soon as possible.

IBC cell: This is the technical route with the highest conversion efficiency in the current photovoltaic cell. The photoelectric conversion efficiency of IBC cells in the early stage of research and development has exceeded 25%, which is better than other cells on the market. But IBC is also the most immature technical route: its production process is very complex, the processing cost is extremely high, and the production equipment is expensive. This makes the commercialization of IBC batteries far more difficult than other technical routes.

In terms of the market, in 2020, with the gradual implementation of the new production capacity of PERC cells, the market share of this route has continued to increase, and has risen to 86.4%. Due to the relatively old technology and weak power generation capacity, the market share of BSF batteries has dropped to 8.8%, down 22.7% from 2019, and has been basically eliminated by the market. N-type batteries (mainly HJT [heterojunction] batteries and TOPCon batteries) are still limited in production scale and usage due to cost issues. The current market share is about 3.5%, a slight increase from 2019.

In addition to traditional crystalline silicon cells, there is currently a completely different photovoltaic cell technology route - thin-film solar cells.

The power generation principle of thin-film solar cells is the same as that of crystalline silicon cells, but a photovoltaic material with a thickness of microns prepared from non-silicon materials such as cadmium sulfide and gallium arsenide is used. Because the basic product form of this material is a thin film, it is named thin film battery.

Thin-film solar cells have the characteristics of low attenuation, light weight, low material consumption, low energy consumption for preparation, and are suitable for integration with buildings. However, because it is still in the early stage of research and development, the current conversion efficiency of thin-film cells is not high. Commercial cadmium telluride thin-film cells and copper-indium-gallium-selenide thin-film cells can be realized, and the laboratory efficiency of the modules is only 19.5% and 16%. ~17%, which is not even as good as the BSF battery, which is on the verge of being eliminated, and the power generation capacity is obviously insufficient. However, the technical route with relatively high conversion efficiency has a series of problems such as being too expensive and too difficult to produce. The superposition of these factors makes it difficult to commercialize thin-film batteries.