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Scientists have discovered a way to mass-produce solar panels made from a so-called miracle material that can significantly increase efficiency.
Perovskites have been hailed as having the potential to revolutionize renewable energy, but durability and reliability issues have made it difficult to translate their record-breaking success in the lab into commercial solar panels. It turns out that there is.
Extensive research into possible manufacturing methods for this technology has concluded that a vacuum-based approach has the potential to manufacture next-generation solar panels at commercial scale.
A team led by Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has found that the vacuum process used to make everything from smartphones to LEDs has proven to be more effective than the solvent-based approaches typically used for manufacturing. I have discovered that there are benefits. Laboratory-scale solar cells.
“Vacuum-based processes have proven their presence in industry for decades,” said Ulrich W. Paezold, professor at KIT’s Institute of Microstructure Technology and Institute of Photonics. I am.
“They can decisively advance the commercialization of solar cells, but they are vastly undervalued.”
Solar cells using a combination of perovskite and silicon have been demonstrated to have a much higher potential for generating electricity from solar energy compared to traditional silicon cells.
In November, researchers at Chinese solar power technology company Longi set a new world record for silicon perovskite tandem solar cells with an efficiency of 33.9 percent. This is nearly 30 percent more efficient than the highest-performance silicon cells.
The next generation cell has a theoretical efficiency limit of 43 percent, which is 50 percent higher than the 29 percent limit for silicon cells, but this is unlikely to be achieved at commercial scale.
Last year, a Chinese startup announced it had made a breakthrough in tandem silicon perovskite solar cells, allowing it to begin mass production and plans to build a factory in Jiangsu province.
British startup Oxford PV also plans to commercialize the technology with a production facility in Germany.
The latest advances are detailed in a paper entitled “Vapor-phase deposition of perovskite photovoltaics: a fast track to commercialization” in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.
