Comment by yareal
1 year ago
As an outsider, what's the appeal of PeSC? The paper says they are less efficient and harder to manufacture, but also that they are the "next generation".
I would have thought the next generation would be more efficient or easier to manufacture or both.
As I understand it, silicon cells have largely been optimized to near their peak potential. There's not much room left for improvements at this point.
Organic and perovskite cells have a higher potential efficiency. Just like was the case with silicon, it will take years of development and incremental improvements to see higher efficiencies in these technologies. Silicon cells were also not very good at the start of their development.
In that sense perovskite has the potential to be the next generation of solar cell. New developments, such as the one demonstrated in the linked paper, are just a step towards that ultimate goal of more efficient solar.
I'm not an expert in this field, so please feel free to correct any mistakes I've made.
Which ones don't have heavy metals?
"Harder to manufacture" is relative. The hope is that they would be easier, because they're not monocrystalline and don't require the high energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method to produce a semiconductor substrate. The paper (and the general "pitch" of perovskites) plans to use roll-to-roll printing on flexible substrates.
a-Si has been at or beyond this level of efficiency since the 90's and also does not require a Cz or FZ process.
It's encouraging to see progress but where perovskite thin films show potential is in an integrated mechanical stack application with silicon, where they can supplement each other's barely-double-digit efficiencies focusing on different parts of the spectrum to combine to reach something on par with traditional crystalline silicon, but thinner and with lower production costs.
Seeing thin film beat crystalline silicon is like seeing nuclear fusion become cost-effective. It's perpetually 10 years away, and has been since the 70's.
The benefit of PeSC is that it can get into efficiencies higher than 20% (higher than traditional industrial cells which typically top out around 18-19%) but the problem with them to date has been the cost of manufacturing. This article is all about solving the "cost of manufacturing" problem.
If we can get the cost of manufacturing PeSC cells down to the same levels of traditional crystalline silicon PV cells then the old style will become obsolete. It's a simple evolution of photovoltaic technology with PeSC cells being the next generation. Not so different from any tech where it's expensive when first introduced but as mass adoption and manufacturing improvements take place the cost comes down.