Photovoltaic technologies

For more than a century, UL has been a leader in instilling a product safety engineering discipline into research, development, design and manufacturing of products world-wide. UL is committed to being a world leader in the safety, performance and quality of PV systems and products.

Currently UL serves photovoltaic (PV) and concentrated solar / concentrating PV.  

UL's Global Market Access solutions

In addition to providing testing and certification services, UL is a leader in standards development, publishing the UL standards for the US market and actively participating in developing global International Electro-technical Commission (IEC) standards.  UL is also a leading organization in supporting the global efforts to harmonize the UL and IEC PV standards with industry colleagues.

UL provides PV manufacturers with the trusted UL (US) and C-UL (Canada) certification Marks, which only UL is authorized to issue, UL offers compliance to the IEC standards and issues the applicable CB certifications to provide safety as well as performance conformity around the globe.

Manufacturers exporting to and within Europe also benefit from the UL-EU Mark. It is based on applicable EN standards and issued exclusively by UL.  Much more than self declaration: the UL-EU Mark is a high quality safety mark and adds significant value to PV products.  

The benefits

• Combine certification efforts and receive global market access in one product submission by working with one reliable partner.
• Predictable market access - significantly reduce ciritical time to market based on reduced project management.
• Shrink certification costs by minimizing administrative and logistic efforts - take advantage of UL's global technical foot-print.
• Public safety mission globally - give your customers confidence in the safety and quality of products you are supplying to the market.

Master and fast track certification program

For PV production equipment manufacturers and PV module manufacturers.

This program is for manufacturers of end-to-end PV production equipment who produce a complete turn-key solution production line for PV modules and then supply the production line to PV module manufacturers.

The manufacturer of the PV production equipment submits basic module designs for certification to sell the production lines of the basic module designs that are essentially pre-certified to the PV module manufacturer. This allows for more efficient PV module test programs as redundant test programs can be avoided on PV modules that are identical in construction, materials and performance.

Product types

• The production lines can be for flat-plate and thin-film PV modules.
• These production lines may include front-end cell production in addition to the back-end module production assembly.

Applicable Standards

• UL 1703
• IEC 61215 | IEC 61646 | IEC 61730

Additional resources

• Download additional info material
• Product Categories (Category Control Numbers - CCN) for regulators and utilities
• For more details, please contact us at photovoltaic@ul.com