An extremely interesting table to view.
Firstly, this is an REC vs Longi panel comparison using Fronius inverters. The system sizes however are different. The REC system has 10.71kws and the Longi 6.6. Yet. As you can see, the Longi is still beating it.
Now we must stress something very important here. This is not our personal information, and there could be other factors at play here. However, they are both meant to be side-by-side east-facing systems.
Personally, from the monitoring we have done over the last few years, we haven't seen a panel beat a Longi. Yet REC has much better write-ups online.
This all stems from how these products sell themselves. For example, REC markets to solar websites, sponsors industry events, and uses previous results such as the Photon tests to justify its price point. Now, it's important to also add here, that this author used to wholesale REC and loves them! Longi on the other hand doesn't bother with nice articles on solar quote sites. It doesn't sponsor industry events and won't do exclusive deals with wholesalers (which is usually how it's done). Meaning that they don't get that industry chatter and people talking them up in chat forums. Why don't they though? Simple, they don't have to!
Longi are the big panel and don't need to spend the money on advertising. No matter what they will get their No.1 market share due to their scale and essentially, their ability to mine silicon in China.
So, how does all this industry crap affect you, the customer? Well, it's very, very hard to do your research properly. The best reputation online for inverters for example is these days the one that we see all the problems with. It doesn't matter where they are manufactured or how easy they are to install for a customer after all. You just want performance and reliability... well, usually anyway.
So, in summary. REC is still a great panel, but it is interesting to see the difference in performance. As we previously said, we've seen the same results ourselves against pretty much everything. Jinko, Canadian, Risen, the list goes on. But, it's important to state, that we also cannot verify these results in the test above. And, even though our tests were on different properties with the same sun angles, different factors can be at play.
Hope we've helped and haven't confused you.
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