Bluetti’s Sora 500 solar panel is incredibly powerful for its size - The Verge

Too bad this 500W N-Type panel isn’t bifacial and isn’t (yet) available in the US.

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We don’t review many solar panels at The Verge, but the tech inside Bluetti’s incredibly portable Sora 500 panel makes it worth a deeper look. The new N-Type panels made by Bluetti and others give you more bang for the buck, pound, and square inch. That’s a big deal for vanlifers like me who depend upon these beefy portable solar panels to extend off-grid stays.

In real-world testing, I saw Bluetti’s 500W panel deliver 509W to my van’s power station, allowing me to generate over 800W when combined with the three sad 140W monocrystalline solar panels I have installed on top of my van. That kind of stationary output is fantastic. I typically consume about 1.6kWh a day, so this array lets me add a full day’s worth of charge in only two hours. I just wish that Bluetti had made the Sora 500 bifacial like Jackery and newcomer Zoupw did with their even lighter, high-wattage, portable, N-Type panels designed to maximize output in less than ideal conditions.

The Sora 500 is priced at €849 in Europe — it isn’t being sold in the US yet. Bluetti spokesperson Ellen Lee tells me that the company wants to bring it to the US market but it’s “currently navigating some shifting regional policies and trade dynamics.” Things that Zoupw and Jackery managed to sort out already.

Bluetti Sora 500 solar panel

- Incredibly compact when folded - Good performance in partial shade - Exceeded rated output - Efficient N-Type TOPCon cells

- Heavy compared to competitors - Single-sided (not bifacial) - Tedious to unfold/pack - Not yet available in the US

Bluetti’s single-sided Sora 500 panel uses TOPCon (Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact) cells, an N-Type technology which is replacing older PERC (Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell) tech. Compared to PERC, TOPCon panels do better in low-light, deal with high temperatures better, and degrade more slowly. TOPCon panels can achieve higher efficiencies (often ~23–25 percent) compared to typical PERC panels (~20–23 percent), depending on implementation.

All these advantages mean that you’ll get more for your money, as soon as you unfurl all 12 panels of the Sora 500 and over their extended lifetime. The panel also features an IP67 resistance to dust and water and an ETFE coating that makes it easier to wipe away dirt that interferes with solar intake.

In my mid-March testing in the south of France at an altitude of about 600 meters, I was regularly seeing the Sora 500 delivering above its rated output, measuring as much as 509W on a cool and cloudless day. It also does a good job of handling the sun being partially shaded.

For example, on a very sunny day when the 12 individual panels that comprise the Sora 500 were producing over 500W, the output dropped to 412W when partially shading one corner panel, and 390W when partially shading the right-most two. Partially shading the four panels just to the right of center dropped the output to 276W.

The output from the Sora 500 dropped dramatically when I blocked the center four panels, falling to just 50W. That’s likely because I choked off the entire array by severing the connection between all four parallel zones. Bluetti uses a half-cut cell design and a 3-series, 4-parallel (3S4P) circuit architecture for the Sora 500. This results in multiple independent power zones by dividing the cells into smaller halves and distributing them across four parallel power paths. It helps to prevent a single shaded area from becoming a bottleneck for the entire panel, like you see with cheaper panels.

Unfortunately, Bluetti chose to cover the back of its panels with fabric and a complex system of kickstands and straps. By comparison, the Zoupw 480W and Jackery SolarSage 500 X N-Type panels are bifacial, meaning they can also collect ambient light from the back of the panels when placed on reflective surfaces like snow, sand, concrete, and, to a lesser extent, grass.

I haven’t tested these panels myself, but I’ve seen unconfirmed user reports claiming to have pushed the Zoupw beyond 525W of output. Importantly, both panels also weigh just 22lb (10kg), making them even lighter than the 28.4lb (12.9kg) Bluetti Sora 500.