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Perovskite Solar Panels Rolled Out (Saule/Skanska)

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Poland based Saule Technologies have signed a distribution agreement with the Skanska group to roll out perovskite solar panels in 2018. This is the first company to bring the technology to market and it’s an exciting step forward for alternatives to the efficiency limited (read about the Shockley-Queisser limit) conventional silicon based solar panels.

Saule Technologies and Perovskite Solar Panels

Perovskite Solar Panels - Saule Technologies and Skanska Group in Poland
Perovskite Solar Panels – Saule Technologies and Skanska Group in Poland (source: skanska.pl)

We’ve previously written about research into perovskite solar cells and Greatcell’s $6m grant towards Perovskite Solar Cell research. But this is the first time they’ve been offered to the public – so it’s a huge step forward for the technology.

Saule Technologies are a Warsaw based start-up who will partner with multinational project development and construction firm Skanska AB to bring the semi-transparent perovskite solar modules to commercial office buildings. According to PV Tech, the first panels will be installed on office buildings in Poland later this year. 

On a press release on their website, Skanska said they have over €20 million in grants for their research and are currently building large-scale, prototype production line. They have been “working on the application of ink-jet printing for fabricating free-form perovskite solar modules since 2014”, so it’s exciting to see their research enter the next phase. 

“It is not a science-fiction vision anymore. Working with talented scientists from Saule, we are now turning fiction into reality and creating buildings which are more energy efficient and carbon neutral. Up to now this has not been possible on a large scale. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges the modern world is facing and it contributes to extreme weather events that are increasing in frequency and severity around the world. As such there is increasing legislative pressure to run businesses in a sustainable and attentive manner,” said Katarzyna Zawodna, CEO of Skanska’s commercial development business in CEE.

View the video below to learn more about manufacturing perovskite solar panels and the ink-jet printing/crystallization process:

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Perovskite Solar Cell Efficiency

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Perovskite solar cell research is continuing at a fantastic rate, with the March issue of academic journal Science reporting that a collaboration between UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology) and the Korean Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) was able to reach 21.2% efficiency with a hybrid organic/inorganic perovskite solar cell.

Perovskite (wiki), a raw material which can be used to harvest solar energy and can be combined with liquid solutions to allow broad application (i.e. the conventional rigid shape of the solar panel could be superseded by something like a ‘spray’ application of a perovskite-based solution), is paving the way for solar technology. Researchers at the ANU (Australian National University) have achieved 26.4% efficiency using a stacked configuration of silicon and perovskite solar cells. The Duong from ANU’s Research School of Engineering heralded the achievement as ‘…a step closer to a low-cost alternative (to silicon based cells)’. It’s important to note that this efficiency was created ANU’s cell size was 0.18cm² (a research size – far from commercially viable). UNSW achieved 12% efficiency for a ‘full size’ 16cm² solar cell last December. Solliance, a Dutch/German/Belgian R&D team, achieved 12.6% in R2R (roll to roll) perovskite solar cells in March.

Perovskite Solar
Perovskite (image: Wikipedia.com)

Although still a far way from the 26.3% efficiency achieved by the Kaneka Corporation using silicon solar panels, it’s important to note that due to the Shockley-Queisser limit silicon panels will never reach greater than 1/3 efficiency. Using perovskite to manufacture solar cells could potentially double this limit – with the added bonus of being inexpensive and using less energy to manufacture. The hybrid organic/inorganic perovskite solar cell discussed at the start of this article (iodine/lead/methyl-ammonium crystalline structure) boosts the efficiency of the panel so that it can carry 2/3 of the energy from light without losing so much to heat.

The fact that this compound can also be applied through myriad techniques such as spraying, dipping, printing, and doctor-blading means that it has a much wider range of application. ‘Solar cells are no longer limited to rigid structures such as panels’, says Dr Anita Ho-baillie, head of Perovskite Solar Cell Research at the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) at UNSW.

Perovskite’s potential in terms of solar cells was first discovered by Japanese researchers in 2006 and Dr Ho-Baillie says she thinks perovskite solar cell efficiency will be able to reach 24% by the end of the year. There’s still a long way to go for perovskite to surpass silicon as the material of choice for solar cells, but progress is steady and as soon as they break the ‘magical’ 30% barrier it’ll become the material of choice for solar panels, if not before.

 

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Kaneka Corporation create Solar Cell with record-breaking 26.3% efficiency.

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Japanese chemical manufacturer Kaneka Corporation have created a solar cell with 26.3% photo conversion rate, a 2.7% efficiency increase on the previous record of 25.6%. This may not seem like much but it’s a little more impressive when you note that silicon based solar cells are currently thought to have a ‘theoretical limit’ for energy conversion. This means that no matter how good technology becomes, silcon will never break 29% – i.e. we’re starting to get closer to the ‘end-game’ of our optimisation of silicon solar cells (and need to start looking at alternatives, which is happening).

The technology was funded by a Japanese government program and develops “industrially compaible cells” by implementing layered silicon inside individual cells to minimise band gaps – this approach is called thin-film hetereojunction (HJ) optimisation. It’s not pioneered by Kaneka, but they have managed to optimise the technique by using low resistance electrodes at the rear of the cell and amorphous silicon with an anti-reflective layer on the top.

Kaneka Corporation Solar
Side view of a solar panel using layers of silicon through HJ (thin-film heterojunction) (courtesy of Kaneka Corporation)

The Kaneka Corporation, based in Osaka, haven’t begun mass production of the panel yet but we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as they’re available. The researchers, led by Mr Kunta Yoshikawa, published their findings in Nature Energy and noted that “further work is required before the individual cells can be assembled into a commercially available solar panel.”

26.3% isn’t the greatest photo conversion rate we’ve achieved but it is, to date, the highest commercially feasible result. In terms of theoretical results, back in 2014 researchers from UNSW Engineering managed to crack 40% by using a ‘solar tower’ with an optical bandpass filter.

In other news there has been a significant breakthrough – also at UNSW – with regards to high performance perovskite solar cells. Read our article on that to see how we could push solar technology further by using perovskite ‘liquid solar cells’ – one of the top 10 emerging technologies of 2016 (as per World Economic Forum)

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