India has launched the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) in 2009 with the ambitious target of installing 20,000 MW of solar power in the country by the year 2022. In order to achieve such a target, there is a need for a large number of trained people in the area of Solar Photovoltaics.

It is our pleasure to present this PV lab training manual as part of the ‘Teach a 1000 Teachers’ training programme on Photovoltaics. This initiative is part of the National Centre for Photovoltaic Research and Education (NCPRE, www.ncpre.iitb.ac.in), established at IIT Bombay by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). We hope that this training initiative taken by NCPRE will be useful in fulfilling the manpower needs of JNNSM.

The manual contains detailed information on several carefully planned experiments on solar PV cells and modules. The planned experiments are in the areas of ‘characterization’ and ‘simulation’. The characterization experiments are planned to allow you to measure various data on solar cells, modules and PV systems. The simulation experiments enable you to simulate solar cells and circuits containing solar cells. For each experiment the details, such as its objective, expected outcome, theory, the equipments used, measurement methodology, results and discussion, are given.