Light induced degradation of CIGS solar cells

Considering warranted lifetimes of PV modules of typically 20-30 years, the performance stability of PV modules is one of the most crucial factors regarding power generation and yield. Long term outdoor performance studies depict realistic operation conditions best, but the correlated nature of e.g. irradiance and temperature impedes the physical interpretation. The possibility to control and tune the conditions in laboratory experiments enables to decompose effects, that are typically overlayed in outdoor experiments. This way, laboratory are crucial to interpret the results obtained in outdoor degradation studies. One driving force of degradation of CIGS modules is light exposure. In literature the focus of light induced degradation (LID) of CIGS modules and solar cells is on metastable changes analyzed on time scales ranging from minutes to hours. In this work we expose industrially produced encapsulated CIGS solar cells for more than 1000 h to light with varied intensity under varied temperature conditions. Such, we aim to study temperature and light intensity dependencies of the observed performance changes. Furthermore, we study the influence of applied bias by comparing LID at short and open circuit. We demonstrate that LID under short circuit conditions leads to VOC degradation, while being temperature assisted and not dependent on the irradiance intensity. CIGS solar cells kept at open circuit conditions appear to be stable under illumination. Exploiting the one diode model, we further connect the observed temperature assisted performance loss to enhanced recombination with lower ideality factor, in comparison to the dominant recombination process before degradation.