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The goal of this Technical Specification is to provide a guideline for manufacturers of photovoltaic (PV) modules to produce modules that, once the design is proven to meet the quality and reliability requirements, replicate the design on an industrial scale without compromising its consistency with the requirements.From 1996 to 2011, the PV industry grew by a factor of almost 400, resulting in annual PV module production greater than 30 gigawatts (GW). With an annual investment in PV around $100 billion, the industry has become highly motivated to ensure quality of that investment, with special emphasis on the quality of the PV modules, as these are the most expensive part of the system to replace and the extent of their power output degradation in the field significantly impacts the return on investment.The International PV Module Quality Assurance Task Force was formed in 2011 to develop standards that can help customers quickly assess a PV product's ability to withstand regional stresses and to gain confidence that purchased PV products will be of consistent quality.Reliability is neither defined, nor covered, by the existing International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards. Module design qualification to those standards does not imply the PV module's reliability. Therefore, the Task Force set the goal to establish guidelines dealing with all relevant influences on the module such as raw materials and components, process parameter sets and their control, reasonable test sequences, training of the staff, etc.Task Group #1 of this Task Force has focused on the requirements of a quality program used to guide the manufacture of PV modules in maintaining module consistency. While ISO 9001 is used as an industry standard for documenting quality programs, it addresses generic elements of a quality management system and does not cover specific details of interest to the PV industry. Starting in fall of 2011, Task Group #1 began to write a PV-specific version of ISO 9001 that would strengthen the quality program by incorporating known requirements for PV. This revision of ISO 9001 will be submitted to IEC/ISO for formal adoption and, once revised by the standards process, will become a standard that can be fully used by the community.In the meantime, this report summarizes the revisions identified by Task Group #1 and provides the community with a way to begin benefitting from the more robust quality programs, even before the standards process is completed. Community experience in implementing this draft standard will also provide essential feedback for the standardization process to help ensure that the adopted standard is optimally useful. In that context, the community is encouraged to use the contents of this report and to provide feedback to the International PV Module QA Task Force and the IEC/ISO standards organizations. We are interested in positive and negative experiences with the application of the recommendations herein.Key requirements in the proposed standard include:• Focus on the organization...

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