Perovskite Tandem Solar Cells

By Kevin Gu '23

As heavy industrialization takes place in the modern days, almost every household is now utilizing more energy day by day. While fossil fuels are non-renewable energy sources and will be depleted someday in the future, we should be aware of the large energy consumption and come up with other solutions. Solar energy would meet the large requirement of energy consumption in the future and help to solve the problem. This article is particularly related to a revolutionary improvement on a type of solar panel made by perovskite and organic materials.

The majority of solar cells in markets nowadays are made of perovskite and inorganic lead materials, which are highly expensive, thus impractical for commercial use. To tackle this problems, researchers have been thinking to make solar cells with perovskite and organic materials. This insight is very attractive for the thin-film photovoltaics next generation, but the lack of efficiency makes it not commercially viable. In order to fix the issue, a group of researchers from the National University of Singapore has now made some progress on power conversion efficiency for solar cells, especially those that use organic materials and perovskite. This team set a new record on solar cell technology, demonstrating a 23.6% on power conversion efficiency, which is almost the same for the inorganic silicon solar cells (26.7%) .

Their work marked a technological breakthrough for more lightweight, cheap, flexible, and ultra-thin photovoltaic cells for a wide variety of uses. This technology is ideal for powering boats, vehicles, blinds, and all other kinds of daily-life machines. The innovational achievements were officially published on 20th, January, 2022 in Nature Energy. It was conducted by experts from both University of Hong Kong and Southern University of Science and Technology. The research demonstrates the great potential of perovskite tandem solar cells for future uses in photovoltaic technology.