The solar industry is approximately 20 years behind aerospace in quality infrastructure. That is not a criticism — it is a structural observation rooted in how the two industries were regulated and funded in their formative decades. Aerospace has had airworthiness regulation driving quality discipline since the 1950s: you could not sell a component to a commercial aircraft manufacturer without demonstrating process control to a regulatory standard. Solar PV manufacturing was driven by cost-per-watt reduction and volume deployment. The optimization function was economic, not safety-driven. Different forces, different outcomes.
The data makes the gap visible. Kiwa PVEL’s 2025 PV Module Reliability Scorecard — the industry’s most comprehensive independent reliability testing programme, now in its 11th edition — reported that 83% of module manufacturers and 59% of bills of materials tested had at least one test failure. This is up from 66% of manufacturers and 41% of BOMs in the 2024 Scorecard. The trend line across five annual scorecards is consistently worsening, not improving. IEA confirmed in its Global Energy Review 2026 that 698 GWp of solar PV was added globally in 2025 — the largest single-year expansion of any electricity generation technology in recorded history — bringing cumulative installed capacity to approximately 2,974 GW.
The solar industry is installing at unprecedented speed. It is qualifying products at insufficient depth. That gap accrues over a 25-year performance guarantee horizon, not a 12-month warranty period.
1. The Quality Infrastructure Gap Is Getting Worse, Not Better
The Kiwa PVEL 2025 Scorecard failure data is specific. Visual inspection major defects accounted for 60% of all failures. Power degradation failures accounted for 21%. Module breakage during Mechanical Stress Sequence testing rose sharply — from a BOM-level failure rate of 7% in 2023 and 2024 to significantly higher levels in 2025, with 40% of manufacturers experiencing at least one MSS failure. Junction box failures appeared in all six consecutive scorecards: 11% of manufacturers had covers falling off, 8% had loose cables or exposed wires, 8% had bypass diode failures.
Kiwa PVEL identified the proximate cause in its 2025 analysis: rapid innovation in cell technology (TOPCon replacing PERC, HJT emerging) combined with aggressive cost reduction is producing new product designs released to production before reliability validation is complete. In July 2025, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology convened leading solar manufacturers — including LONGi, JA Solar, Trina, and Tongwei — explicitly urging them to end „disorderly low-price competition“ and improve product quality. The Chinese government identified product quality deterioration as a direct consequence of price competition that had driven module prices to approximately USD 0.10/Watt — a 45% reduction year-on-year. Following the meeting, polysilicon prices climbed nearly 30% from June lows.
NREL has explicitly noted that IEC 61215 is designed to identify early failures in the first 5-10 years — insufficient for assessing long-term risk or establishing field performance degradation over a 25-year service life. The standard itself acknowledges its limitation. The industry has been slower to act on it.
2. The Methods That Transfer Directly
Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP)
APQP is the automotive manufacturing industry’s framework for ensuring that product design, process design, and quality planning are completed before production begins. Quality Magazine noted in its June 2025 IA9100 analysis that „customers — particularly primes like Boeing, Airbus, and Lockheed Martin — are increasingly demanding APQP evidence during contract award and oversight activities.“ Under IA9100:2026, APQP and PPAP become officially required tools supported by IA9145 guidance.
The core APQP discipline: you do not release a product to full production volume until you have validated that the production process — not the prototype process — can consistently produce product that meets specification. For solar manufacturing, the equivalent APQP would require that before any new cell technology is released to high-volume production, the manufacturer demonstrates process capability for all critical characteristics across multiple production lots, equipment performance stability at the production throughput target, BOM qualification for all new component inputs, and reliability testing results sufficient to predict long-term field performance with defined confidence.
This does not happen systematically in the solar industry today. The Kiwa PVEL Scorecard trend line — consistently worsening failure rates — is the measurable consequence.
Control Plans and Process FMEA
A control plan defines, for each step in the production process, what characteristics are being controlled, how they are measured, the measurement frequency, and the response plan when a measurement falls outside the control limits. In automotive production of safety-critical components, control plans are mandatory PPAP deliverables audited by customer quality teams as standard qualification activity.
In solar module production, the equivalent — a documented process control plan covering lamination cure temperature, encapsulant application uniformity, junction box sealing integrity, and final module electrical parameters — is present at some manufacturers and absent at many others. Its absence does not prevent IEC 61215 certification. It does predict the failure modes appearing in the Kiwa PVEL Scorecard. Process FMEA on lamination and junction box assembly processes, using AIAG-VDA FMEA methodology, would identify these failure modes before they appear in field data. The failure modes are not new — they have appeared in six consecutive annual reliability reports. What is missing is the systematic process-level analysis that should have addressed them.
Supplier Quality Agreements with Process Audit Requirements
In automotive and aerospace, supplier qualification requires a process audit — not just incoming test data and type approval. The question is whether the supplier’s process is stable enough to consistently produce material within specification across production lots, across equipment generations, and across operator changes. In solar manufacturing, cell, encapsulant, backsheet, and junction box suppliers are frequently qualified on the basis of type approval and incoming test data. The junction box pottant cure failures that persist across six Kiwa PVEL Scorecards are the predictable outcome of this gap.
3 Concrete Actions
1. For utility-scale solar developers and asset owners: build process audit rights into your module procurement agreements as a standard contractual requirement. The right to audit the lamination process, junction box assembly, and incoming material qualification is the minimum condition for making a credible 25-year performance claim. This requirement is absent from IEC 61215 and IEC 61730 — it will not exist unless you specify it contractually and enforce it.
2. For module manufacturers seeking to differentiate on quality: commission a process FMEA on your lamination and junction box assembly processes using AIAG-VDA FMEA methodology. The failure modes appearing in six consecutive Kiwa PVEL Scorecards are your starting point — they are documented, industry-visible, and addressable. The output is a control plan that addresses those failure modes at the process level rather than the output inspection level.
3. For solar project financiers and insurance underwriters evaluating module quality risk: request Kiwa PVEL PQP test data for the specific BOM being specified in the project — not the manufacturer’s Top Performer designation. Kiwa PVEL explicitly cautions buyers not to use the scorecard as a shopping list. Top Performer status means the manufacturer had at least one BOM that achieved top performance in a given test category. It does not mean every BOM from that manufacturer performs equivalently. The specific BOM test data is the relevant risk information.
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Sources
- IEA — Global Energy Review 2026: Technology Solar PV and Wind (May 2026), iea.org
- Kiwa PVEL — 2025 PV Module Reliability Scorecard, 11th Edition (June 2025), pvel.com
- Kiwa PVEL Scorecard — Failures in Testing: Visual, MSS, HSS, Junction Box (scorecard.pvel.com)
- TaiYang News — Test Failures Surge in Kiwa PVEL’s 2025 Module Reliability Scorecard (June 2025), taiyangnews.com
- NREL — IEC 61215 Qualification Tests vs Outdoor Performance, nrel.gov
- Quality Magazine — A Deeper Dive into Aero Quality: APQP Evidence Demanded by Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin (June 2025), qualitymag.com
- Cavendish Scott — IA9100: APQP and PPAP Officially Required Tools (October 2025), cavendishscott.com
- AIAG-VDA — FMEA Handbook, 1st Edition (2019). Automotive Industry Action Group.
- IEC 61215 — Terrestrial Photovoltaic (PV) Modules: Design Qualification and Type Approval
- IEC 61730 — Photovoltaic (PV) Module Safety Qualification
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