Tindo Solar has begun production of a high-efficiency rooftop panel, the 405W Karra panel. Starting in April 2022, it’s taking place at the company’s new Adelaide factory – Australia’s only solar panel manufacturing facility.

After having the Karra panel certified by the Clean Energy Council, it’s now registered under the small-scale technology (STC) scheme, reducing the overall installation cost for consumers.

Karra is designed for both residential and commercial rooftops and comes with a 25-year product warranty as well as an end-of-life recycling guarantee due to Tindo Solar’s partnership with Reclaim PV.

The Karra is being made at the company’s new 150MW, state-of-the-art factory at Mawson Lakes in Adelaide which is three times larger than the previous Tindo factory and houses a new production line that utilises the M10 solar cell, the new global standard.

Tindo Solar chief executive Shayne Jaenisch says the first production run of the Karra 405w would be packaged and shipped to customers this week, with the first recipients being corporate and government customers.

“It’s a real compliment to our workforce that we’re manufacturing a solar panel with such high levels of reliability, performance and safety that corporate and government buyers prefer to buy Tindo Solar when they have the choice of imports from around the world,” he says.

TUV SUD Korea evaluated Tindo Solar’s new panel and established that the module has the lowest cell-to-module (CTM) loss ratio of an Australia-made module.

The engineers at TUV found the panels produced 405W of power at around 21% module efficiency and 23.1% cell efficiency and recorded just 0.07% CTM loss. The industry average energy efficiency of a solar module is between 17 and 19%, and the average CTM loss is 2-3%.

“It’s a real compliment to our workforce that we’re manufacturing a solar panel with such high levels of reliability, performance and safety that corporate and government buyers prefer to buy Tindo Solar when they have the choice of imports from around the world,” Shayne adds.

“It takes a lot of work behind the scenes to design a new panel, with new components, to be produced on a brand-new production line. We should be proud that in Australia we have the engineers and the technical skills to commercially produce one of the highest-performing solar panels in the world, right here in Adelaide.”