Science is getting close—research continues to break the boundary that makes solar cells more efficient, and very affordable. This may be made possible by the invention of a new type of organic-inorganic-hybrid perovskite solar cell material.
But what is perovskite, and why is it important?
Perovskite is a unique material that is far cheaper to produce and generates almost as much power as today's thin film solar cells. Even better, it converts 15% of sunlight it receives into electricity. Data very close to the efficiency of current solar cells. The important thing to note here is that solar cells made from this perovskite material are five times less expensive.
Nanyang Technological University reports:
"Now that we know exactly how perovskite materials behave and work, we will be able to tweak the performance of the new solar cells and improve its efficiency, hopefully reaching or even exceeding the performance of today's thin-film solar cells," said Dr Mathews, who is also the Singapore R&D Director of the Singapore-Berkeley Research Initiative for Sustainable Energy (SinBeRISE) NRF CREATE program.
"Perovskite-based solar cells have the potential to reach 20 per cent solar cell efficiencies and another great benefit of these materials is their amenability to yield different translucent colors, such as red, yellow or brown. Having such colorful solar glass will create new opportunities for architectural design."
Credit:
Assistant Professor Sum Tze Chien and Dr Nripan Mathews with Professor Michael Grätzel based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).
Story + Image + Study
