Researchers in Australia and China are working towards an innovative solar cell that could change how we do business. However, many hurdles remain.
The main ingredient is Perovskite, a crystalline form first discovered in Russia in the early 1800s. Engineers want this material to create less expensive and more effective solar panels. This could be done when combined with silicon-based panels that are more well-known and last longer.
“There’s a lot of emphasis now on improving efficiency, and that’s why there’s suddenly these tandem approaches,” explained Thomas White, a research scientist and professor at the Australian National University (ANU).
A different reason is that he added: “It’s getting harder and harder to squeeze the manufacturing costs down.”
White and others believe that the key to progress is improving energy conversion efficiency. This is the extent to which a panel transforms sunlight’s energy directly into electricity.
Photovoltaic panels made of silicon (PV) panels usually have efficiency levels of between 16% and 18%. According to researchers, the theoretical maximum for silicon PV effectiveness is 29 percent.
Research suggests that a perovskite solar panel may have efficiencies as high as 35% while cutting costs by eliminating specific steps of the process of manufacturing.
“The beauty of them is you can process them from solution,” White explained during an interview. “Unlike silicon, where you have to go through this very industrialized refinement to get very high purity silicon, these materials we buy effectively as a powder, we mix them into a solvent, and then we can spin coat them or coat them in very thin layers onto a glass substrate, and that potentially makes them very cheap if you can scale it up.”
The possibility has drawn attention and the attention of.
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) recently announced funding to help research and development in the direction of advanced solar photovoltaic energy technologies. An additional $15 million will be accessible to R&D teams to develop end-of-life solar PV solutions, specifically “increasing the cost-effectiveness of silicon-based solar PV through the use of tandem materials.”
ARENA has received the support of researchers at the Australian National University and Chinese solar panel manufacturer JinkoSolar in its more extensive R&D efforts to commercialize Perovskite Solar technology.
The ANU team set a new record-setting perovskite solar cell the previous year. It achieved 21.6 percent efficiency in the laboratory. Researchers from the United States and South Korea have achieved conversion efficiencies for Perovskite of 24.2 percent. However, ANU announced their team’s achievement was “the highest ever achieved for perovskite cells above a certain size.”
In a report released recently on Solar PV’s future, International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) identified Perovskite in its description as “one of the most promising materials” in solar technology research today–“a kind of mineral adept in the absorption of sunlight” as well as “very easy to make in the lab.”
It’s worth keeping an eye on perovskite solar research and development, IRENA said, but the agency warned that it could take a long time for Chinese, Australian, U.S. and other research projects to solve the puzzle to bring it into commercial use.
Durability is the most significant obstacle: perovskite crystals break down faster than silicon.
“Because the crystals dissolve easily, they are not able to handle humid conditions and need to be protected by moisture through encapsulation, for instance through an aluminum oxide layer or sealed glass plates,” IRENA explained.
White of ANU acknowledged the deficiency. Perovskite does not take the heat like silicon, he said.
“The main challenge at the moment is stability,” he stated. “We’re still trying to get them stable enough to be able to put them on a roof in 25 years. That’s a big issue.”
This is a problem he believes is possible to overtake, in particular through using the “tandem” approach promoted by ARENA, which is where the Perovskite is paired with a silicone layer to increase the efficiency of solar energy conversion as well as improve the durability and stability. The most important benefit of the tandem approach is excellent energy capture.
“If you take two solar cell materials and put them together, you can optimize one cell to absorb blue and green light, which provides high energy, and another cell is optimized for infrared light,” White said. “And if you put the two together, stack one on top of another, then that efficiency limit goes up significantly.”
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. IRENA believes this technology could revolutionize the solar industry “if these barriers can be overcome.”
“Perovskite cells have the potential to change the dynamics and economics of solar power because they are cheaper to produce than solar cells and can be produced at relatively low temperatures, unlike silicon,” the agency said.
Engineers from universities of China in China and the United States took an in-depth review of the current condition of perovskite solar cell research in a new issue of the journal Scientific Advanced Functional Materials. Their article acknowledged the problems in improving stability and emphasized their “astounding progress in the efficiency of perovskite solar cells.”
However, the team concluded that the next step should concentrate on making Perovskite as robust as silicon before commercialization could be a reality.