In one of the most exciting, and as yet mostly unknown bits of emerging technology, researchers at Oxford and Stanford Universities have successfully developed a seemingly stable Perovskite solar array.
LOWER PRODUCTION COST
If manufacturing tests are proven to be true, this could revolutionise the solar power industry, as it removes one of the core problems associated with solar technology at the moment. Currently, if you want to make a solar panel, it needs a lot of energy to actually create. This means production cost is high, difficult to achieve without specialist equipment (expensive of course) and means the amount of power put in to make equates to a low efficiency system for power harvesting. One of the researchers at Oxford, Tomas Leijtens, says: ‘A silicon solar panel begins by converting silica rock into silicon crystals through a process that involves temperatures above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,600 degrees Celsius). Perovskite solar cells can be processed in a laboratory from common materials like lead, tin, iodine and bromine, then printed on glass at room temperature.’
The Perovskite cell, however, seems to be able to be produced in normal laboratory conditions without the use of loads of massive expensive equipment. Two Perovskite cells are stacked in tandem, and allow for both a large and a small energy gap, which allows additional harvesting of solar energy. At the moment, even in it’s early stages, Professor Michael McGehee, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford claims they have “a robust, all-perovskite device that converts sunlight into electricity with an efficiency of 20.3%, a rate comparable to silicon solar cells on the market today.”
For an early technology in its infancy to be able to produce results like this, results which rival the currently commercially available tech for a fraction of the cost, is a huge step forward. Watch this space in the coming years and perhaps we will see Perovskite cells becoming the new norm for our energy needs.
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