Photovoltaic Module Reliability

7The PVQAT Effort

To help address the issues with the “do it yourself” system of module quality discussed in the last chapter and to focus the PV industry on a consensus approach to improving module quality, Sarah Kurtz and John Wohlgemuth from NREL in the US, Masaaki Yamamichi and Michio Kondo of The National Institute oif Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan and Tony Sample from Joint Research Centre of European Union (JRC) in Europe with the assistance of James Amano of SEMI, organized the International PV Module Quality Assurance Forum. The Forum was held in July, 2011 in San Francisco, CA with more than 150 PV experts from around the world in attendance. The two‐day Forum started with a number of presentations providing updates on what the presenters felt were the most pressing PV module reliability issues. The attendees then proceeded to discuss what was needed in order to solve those issues [1].

The Forum created a new organization entitled the International PV Quality Assurance Task Force, called PVQAT for short (Pronounced PV CAT) [2]. The forum set two goals for the new organization:

1. Development of a QA rating system that provides comparative information about the relative durability of PV modules; and
2. Creation of a guideline for factory inspections of the QA system used during PV‐module manufacturing.

A third goal related to development of a conformity assessment system was added later. This third goal is:

3. Development of a comprehensive system ...