Perovskite solar cells are an alternative to conventional silicon solar cells, and are poised to overtake the market with their high power-conversion efficiencies (over 22% now) and lower capital expenditure and manufacturing costs. But one of the greatest obstacles on this road is stability: to be commercially viable, perovskite solar cells must also be able to maintain their efficiency over time, meaning that they must not degrade significantly over 25 years of service.
Perovskite solar cells are an alternative to conventional silicon solar cells, and are poised to overtake the market with their high power-conversion efficiencies (over 22% now) and lower capital expenditure and manufacturing costs. But one of the greatest obstacles on this road is stability: to be commercially viable, perovskite solar cells must also be able to maintain their efficiency over time, meaning that they must not degrade significantly over 25 years of service.
“As a first-order approximation, we are talking about stabilities of several years for the most stable perovskite solar cells,” says Konrad Domanksi, first author on the paper. “We still need an increase of an order of magnitude to reach the stabilities of silicon cells.”
While research efforts are continuously made to improve perovskite stability, the community is hamstrung by the fact that there are no general standards by which scientists can measure the stability of perovskite solar cells. Consequently, the results coming in from different laboratories and companies cannot be easily compared to each other. And even though dedicated stability measurement standards have been developed for other photovoltaic technologies, they have to be adapted for perovskite solar cells, which show new types of behavior.
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