Larger means larger. A 600W panel is definitely going to be oversized. The best solar panels are about 20% efficient regardless of size, so a 600W will be 50% larger (area) than a 400W panel. Did you mean something different?
I primarily meant panels that were larger in power without being larger in size, so driven by increases in efficiency.
How long it will take to trickle-down to widely-available products, we can debate, but there is no debate that increases in efficiency to at least 30% are on the way:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.po...ar-cell-efficiency-record-perovskite-silicon/
On the current-generation of 500W+ panels, I’m specifically interested in max power at the size of 72-cell and equivalents like 144-half-cut-cell. meaning ~2 meters by ~1 meter.
So I was not including the higher power panels which achieved that increase by adding columns (8x12 cells rather than 6x12 cells).
What screwed me up is that I missed the fact that several manufacturers are now using larger wafer sizes, and that means all ‘72-cell’ panels are no longer the same (some are longer in both X and Y).
The 380W panels I just bought are a true 39” x 78”, so classic 72-cell dimensions.
That same vender offers 144-half-cut-cell 415W panels that are 39.2” x 79.3”, so they are bigger than classic 72-cell but only by ~2.2% (so I’d be inclined to include them in my definition of ‘classic’).
And then they offer a 425W model with dimensions of 40.6” x 81.9” (so ~9.3% bigger than classic 72-cell). Those are obviously trying to get close to 72-cell dimensions but it’s hard to overlook a 3.9” / 5% increase in width, so maybe I’ll call those ‘classic+’ (<110% the area of classic 72-cell with at least one dimension within 105% of classic).
And finally, my vendor also currently offers a 430W panel which is 41.42” x 83.27” or 13.4% larger in area and over 6% larger in either dimension, so I’d have to put that in a different panel class entirely, classic++?
Outside of the US, Jinko is currently selling 540W modules:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mMWUk55lh5yJawJQbIp5hNK2p2VGTNeR/view
with a size of 44.65” x 87.8”, 29% larger in area and over 12% larger in either dimension, so definitely a member of your ‘larger size’ camp and way outside of the ‘classic 72-cell’ category.
It’s kind of a mess, really. Until they settle down all these new panel sizes to a more limited set of standards, mixing and matching panels is going to be much more difficult.
The 380W modules I just bought had efficiency of 19.08%, so once we see modules with 30% efficiency widely-available, that should translate to similar-sized panels offering power of close to 600W.
So if that’s the roadmap in front of us: 39” x 78” panels delivering close to 600W, another way of asking my question is where on that roadmap folks think we will be before the end of 2023?