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New Photovoltaic Tech Could Rival Silicon-Based Solar Cells (princeton.edu) 87

Posted by EditorDavid from the bright-futures dept.
"While silicon-based solar cells dominate the photovoltaics market, silicon is far from the only material that can effectively harvest electricity from sunlight," notes Ars Technica: Thin-film solar cells using cadmium and telluride are common in utility-scale solar deployments, and in space, we use high-efficiency cells that rely on three distinct materials to harvest different parts of the spectrum. Another class of materials, which we're currently not using, has been the subject of extensive research: perovskites. These materials are cheap and incredibly easy to process into a functional solar cell. The reason they're not used is that they tend to degrade when placed in sunlight, limiting their utility to a few years. That has drawn the attention of the research community, which has been experimenting with ways to keep them stable for longer.

In Thursday's edition of Science, a research team from Princeton described how they've structured a perovskite material to limit the main mechanism by which it decays, resulting in a solar cell with a lifetime similar to that of silicon. While the perovskite cell isn't as efficient as what is currently on the market, a similar structure might work to preserve related materials that have higher efficiencies.
Their research involved a capping layer that's just a few atoms thick, according to an announcement from Princeton University, calling the resulting solar cell "a major milestone for an emerging class of renewable energy technology... the first of its kind to rival the performance of silicon-based cells, which have dominated the market since their introduction in 1954..."

"The team projects their device can perform above industry standards for around 30 years, far more than the 20 years used as a threshold for viability for solar cells." Perovskites can be manufactured at room temperature, using much less energy than silicon, making them cheaper and more sustainable to produce. And whereas silicon is stiff and opaque, perovskites can be made flexible and transparent, extending solar power well beyond the iconic panels that populate hillsides and rooftops across America....

[Engineering professor/team lead] Loo said it's not that perovskite solar cells will replace silicon devices so much that the new technology will complement the old, making solar panels even cheaper, more efficient and more durable than they are now, and expanding solar energy into untold new areas of modern life. For example, Loo's group recently demonstrated a completely transparent perovskite film (having different chemistry) that can turn windows into energy producing devices without changing their appearance. Other groups have found ways to print photovoltaic inks using perovskites, allowing formfactors scientists are only now dreaming up.
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New Photovoltaic Tech Could Rival Silicon-Based Solar Cells More

New Photovoltaic Tech Could Rival Silicon-Based Solar Cells

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  • It's fucking lead (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @12:55AM (#62632762)

    It's fucking lead, just drop this stupid idea right now. Biological impact of lead from halide perovskites reveals the risk of introducing a safe threshold. [nature.com]

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      So? Encapsulating solar cells is not difficult...

      • You didn't click the link, did you?

        "Perovskite-based solar cells (PSCs) are on their way to mass commercialization as standalone technology and in tandem with silicon solar cells for both large-scale energy production and portable electronics. Today, the best performing and the more stable PSCs make use of lead salts, which can pollute the environment with a dramatic impact on human health. Even the most rigorous encapsulation and the strictest recycling procedures cannot exclude the risk of leaking halide

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          You didn't click the link, did you?

          I do have a "bullshit" filter which you seem to be lacking. This is nonsense written obviously written by somebody in deep hysteria. Can be discounted.

          • Re:It's fucking lead (Score:4, Interesting)

            by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @08:55AM (#62633348)
            We've long had problems with encapsulation of c-Si solar panels as well. Now in case of c-Si panels, this typically leads to water ingress and corrosion, which damages the panel but isn't really problematic for the environment. You then need to spend the labor and a spare panel to replace the faulty one. The prospect of the escape of soluble salts of lead is somewhat worse, though. Also, even if you didn't care about the environment, you'd *still* have to protect perovskite PV modules much more against water ingress than you'd ever need with c-Si panels. None of the components of c-Si panels are water-soluble. So chances are that proper encapsulation will be much more critical for perovskite modules even just to make them function normally, not just for environmental protection reasons.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Sure. But that is a reason for more research, not for "Waaaah! Lead! Run!"

              • IMO the real problems with perovskites are instability and system imbalance due to performance trade-offs. Diminished performance compared to a c-Si panel might be too much to swallow from the whole-system perspective even if the panel came for free (because panels are not even the majority of costs anymore). So perovskites really need to step up on performance (close to c-Si is mandatory) and lifetime (comparable lifetime to c-Si is mandatory, too). So far performance of perovskites in lab seems comparabl

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by gweihir ( 88907 )

                  At this time, yes. These materials are not ready for production. On the other hand, they have a reasonable change of getting there and research has not stalled. Hence it is worthwhile to invest more into research. It is very much not worthwhile to bet the farm on them. But that is how applied research works: You look at 100 speculative somewhat promising things for the few that will pan out and the few others than will solve some other problem nicely.

                  And yes, it may happen that they do get good results even

          • And how is any of that bullshit? You just seem to want solar power and are willing to dismiss obvious risks.

        • Even the most rigorous encapsulation and the strictest recycling procedures cannot exclude the risk of leaking halide perovskites into the environment during the life cycle of solar cells and other optoelectronics.
          In other words: if a stupid child uses his slingshot to break your window, that is covered with perovskites, then there is a risk that lead can get into the environment from shards that do not get collected.

          Otherwise: there is no risk at all.

          • Hail storm, duh. Or really anything else that can damage glass. All it takes is one little hairline crack or fracture and it's a problem.

            • No it is not a problem.
              As the amount of lead that possible could escape is so low a layman can not even measure it.
              Bottom line: the lead is bound in a complex molecule: it can not escape out of glas due to a crack. That is a no brainer.

      • Hello self absorbed doofus laying a turd on the internet again.

    • Wait until you learn how dangerous fecal matter is.

  • perovskites can be made flexible and transparent

    Presumably, they cannot be made transparent when you want a high-efficiency solar panel. If the panel is letting the light pass through then it isn't converting it into power.

    • That's not true, light is made up of different frequencies and it's a certain frequency that generates the power. Ofcourse they won't be as efficient as normal panels, but if you can replace any window with this stuff it certainly adds to the needed power. Especially with batteries at home to store the unused energy.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by mcswell ( 1102107 )

        The narrower the frequency band that the material responds to, the less of the sunlight's energy is contained in that band. The broader the frequency band, the less light gets through, i.e. the less transparent the window is at that frequency. Suppose for example that the material generated electricity from bluish light, but let other frequencies pass. Then when you looked out, the sky would look black, as would my car (which happens to be blue).

        If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], you'll se

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Have a look at what qualifies as "high-efficiency" in solar cells.

      • The amount that's visible is more than I would have guessed:

        "Of the light that reaches Earthâ(TM)s surface, infrared radiation makes up 49.4% of while visible light provides 42.3%. Ultraviolet radiation makes up just over 8% of the total solar radiation."

        ...and of the three (infrared/visible/UV), infrared and UV aren't as easy to harvest: "Wavelengths in the infrared spectrum have too little of the energy needed to jostle electrons loose in the solar cellâ(TM)s silicon, the effect that produc

    • Visible light, as in visible for the human eye, is a very narrow band.

      Most perovskites work in the infra red range ...

  • Stupidest Environment Idea Yet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @01:19AM (#62632798)

    First seeing as Princeton for some odd reason didn't want to actually say anything about what the solar cells were made of and what was involved in the process, here's the actual paper.

    https://www.science.org/doi/10... [science.org]

    Abstract
    To understand degradation routes and improve the stability of perovskite solar cells (PSCs), accelerated aging tests are needed. Here, we use elevated temperatures (up to 110 Celsius) to quantify the accelerated degradation of encapsulated CsPbI3 PSCs under constant illumination. Incorporating a 2D Cs2PbI2Cl2 capping layer between the perovskite active layer and hole-transport layer stabilizes the interface while increasing power conversion efficiency of the all-inorganic PSCs from 14.9% to 17.4%. Devices with this 2D capping layer did not degrade at 35 Celsius and required >2100 hours at 110 Celsius under constant illumination to degrade by 20% of their initial efficiency. Degradation acceleration factors based on the observed Arrhenius temperature dependence predict intrinsic lifetimes of 51,000 ± 7,000 hours (>5 years) operating continuously at 35 Celsius.

    Emphasis mine, but Cesium and Lead somehow don't seem environmentally wonderful or particularly abundant.

    • Because of hail etc, the glass would have to be toughened. I do not know much of polymers, but do know plastic pet drink bottles turn deep brown, over a few years in strong sunlight. If toughened safety glass, then: See Exploding Glass Panels â" Building Defects. The problem of nickel sulphide particles causing toughened glass panels to spontaneously shatter or explode without any mechanical damage being caused to them has been known about in expert glass articles since at least the 1960â(TM)s or

    • Emphasis mine, but Cesium and Lead somehow don't seem environmentally wonderful or particularly abundant.

      Lead is abundant and cheap. It is a neurotoxin, but it shouldn't be a problem as long as you don't grind up the panels and eat them.

      Cesium is not toxic at low levels. It is rare but still 100 times as abundant as silver.

      • This will make disposal difficult. It will make damaged panels dangerous; especially ones with hairline cracks that could leech bioavailable halides into groundwater. It took years to get rid of leaded gasoline. How long will it take us to rid ourselves of leaded solar panels?

        • So the solar panels will need to be recycled just like the cadmium telluride panels.

          Lead doesn't tend to move around very much in the environment. As soon as it finds a sulfide, a sulfate, or a carbonate it's back to being a rock.

      • No it's not lead is running out
        https://www.visualcapitalist.c... [visualcapitalist.com]
        As for eating lead, you mean like nobody would eat paint chips?

    • First seeing as Princeton for some odd reason didn't want to actually say anything about what the solar cells were made of and what was involved in the process, here's the actual paper.
      That is an pretty odd statement, when the paper you linked pretty clearly states from what materials the solar cell is made.

      Emphasis mine, but Cesium and Lead somehow don't seem environmentally wonderful or particularly abundant.
      That is also an pretty odd statement, as both elements are extremely abundant and cheap, and worke

    • If you're not inhaling it or drinking it, what's the problem? These are typically very thin layers anyway, not like lead soldering in plumbing or flashing around chimneys. Mandating recycling would likely go a long way. You likely have lots of these scary compounds in your flat screen TV in similar quantities.

  • Unmentioned is the cost per watt, which is the most important thing. Therefore I conclude there is a lot of work to do on that.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      It's an important factor, but efficiency matters too. If I am going to put them on my roof then it costing $1000 is all very well, but not if it can't even charge an AA battery over the course of the day, as I only have one roof. $100,000 to capture all the energy? Only worth it if I can somehow finance that and sell all the excess to pay back the loan. $10,000 for 25% and about enough to power the house to a reasonable degree? That might work.

  • Aaaagh (Score:3)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @01:43AM (#62632826)
    I've heard, seen, read, endless papers on perovskite solar cells. The stuff is always just one more breakthrough away from replacing silicon in solar cells and ushering in a new era. We just need to make sure the lead doesn't leak. Or the lifetime is long enough. Or the efficiency is high enough, or if we could just get the charge carriers to-

    Listen, when companies actually start buying perovskite solar cells in a place with good environmental protection then maybe I'll believe they're going to rival or beat current solar cells. Until them I'm bored sick of hearing about them.

    • Re:Aaaagh (Score:4)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @02:17AM (#62632874)

      If you don't want to read stories about speculative scientific research, then why are you on Slashdot?

      This is news for nerds. If you don't like it, go back to Facebook.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

        If you don't want to read stories about speculative scientific research, then why are you on Slashdot?

        To taunt crypto boosters?

    • Until them I'm bored sick of hearing about them.
      Sure idiot.

      And we are bored sick about idiots like you.

      The stuff is always just one more breakthrough away from replacing ...
      And what is wrong with that? Dumbass? That is how science, technology and engineering works: you work hard in very fine increments until a fine - probably unexpected - increment gives you the "break through". Stupid idiot. If you can not grasp that: then stop reading articles about it, and don't bother us to bore us with your idiotic un

  • 20 years used as a threshold for viability (Score:3)

    by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @01:45AM (#62632828)
    Uhh...these days, 80% at 25 years is the standard performance warranty and definitely over 30 years is what you'd expect. 80% at 39 years is not impossible for silicon [youtube.com] and this was when the industry was at a much more primitive state. So they're chasing the standards of yestermillenium, so as to speak.

    • If the panels are cheap enough, a shorter lifetime is acceptable.

      • That's not really true since you can't consider performance figures in isolation. For example, you might think that half the lifetime for 40% of the cost is a good tradeoff. Maybe for the panel itself, but the problem is that you then need to include money for much more frequent panel replacements. It's impossible to say whether a panel lifetime/cost trade-off is advantageous in isolation. In the US, for example, because of the tremendous labor and soft costs compared to the rest of the world, trade-offs th
        • For this kind of analysis, just talking about a lifetime in years isn't as helpful. The more important number is the efficiency over time (which is commonly reduced to a lifetime). If the shape of the curve is the same as for current solar panels, then the "lifetime" is the same, the efficiency is just always 50% (for example) of current panels. The bigger concern would be if the efficiency drops off much more sharply after (for example) 15 years, so that the panels become basically useless.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
          Yes, installation cost matters. But let's say you had a choice between $10,000 which is $7500 for panels, $2500 for installation now, with a lifetime of 40 years before you absolutely needed to replace, versus $3500 for the panels with 20 years. The outlay would be $6000 now and you get immediate savings. You can invest the $4000 and in 20 years, if you are still around, you might be able to spend $2000 to get panels with the same efficiency that will last 20 years, plus $2500 in installation (I'm assuming
          • Uh, you can already get working second-hand c-Si panels with 20 years remaining for less than those $3500 already. People re-power their installations for whatever reason and shopping around gives you very cheap panels which already beat any existing perovskite devices. So perovskite researchers have many more years of research ahead of them. Which is not to say that the market will never shift, but it will take at least a decade even if everything goes absolutely swimmingly for them. There's just too many
  • We read so often articles about a spectacular new technology that would be so much better than currently adopted solutions... if it weren't for some defect that actually makes it worse when adopted in a real context - be it price, availability, durability, safety, and so on.
    I remember articles about new rechargeable batteries that would be very durable and had the only problem of requiring gold for their electrodes; but I'm also thinking about some slashdot favorites, such as next generation nuclear reacto

  • cadmium and telluride (Score:3)

    by fortunatus ( 445210 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @02:47AM (#62632916)
    When I see this kind of mistake right at the top of an article, I have to wonder who's writing and why. Cadmium and tellerium are elements; cadmium telluride is a compound of the two. "Cadmium and telluride" could only have been written by someone with zero experience in photonics or chemistry.

  • "easy to process into a functional solar cell. The reason they're not used is that they tend to degrade when placed in sunlight, "

    To say it in the words of the immortal Dread Pirate Roberts: "That puts a damper on our relationship."

  • Renewable solar energy news always ignores the most important fact: recycling solar panels is problematic. There is not nearly enough infrastructure in place, nor development invested, in recycling these components. Do a search for "solar panel waste", judge for yourself.

    • Now add lead to the mix.

    • It's a chicken and egg problem. Solar panels last so long that it took a very long time to actually get industrially interesting amounts of panel waste to get someone interested in recycling. But to say that "there's no development" or "recycling is problematic" is somewhat misinformed [reuters.com], to put it very mildly.
      • Gotta love how PV shills, when talking about nuclear, always scream at the top of their lungs "BUT WHAT ABOUT WAAASTE" (which is an already SOLVED problem), but when it comes to recycling PV panels it's perfectly okay to handwave the problem away because some magic fairy dust technology is juuust around the corner, right?
        • Nuclear waste is not-quite-solved-yet (who has long-term-storage already up and operating?) but also not *that* much of a problem, honestly (there's not a lot of it). However, dealing with c-Si solar panels at EoL is trivial in comparison because you're just separating elements, not isotopes (and the elements are mostly separated in the panel anyway). That's no "handwaving"; we know perfectly well what to do with those material streams.

          • Nuclear waste is not-quite-solved-yet (who has long-term-storage already up and operating?) but also not *that* much of a problem, honestly (there's not a lot of it). However, dealing with c-Si solar panels at EoL is trivial in comparison because you're just separating elements, not isotopes (and the elements are mostly separated in the panel anyway). That's no "handwaving"; we know perfectly well what to do with those material streams.

            Ah, ok, so I guess I can stop sorting waste. After all all the trouble with plastics, glass, paper is easily solved by "just separating elements", and that's easy, right? All waste is just mostly carbon hydrogen and oxygen. And as you said, "element separation" is trivial, so why worry?

        • The problem with technological advancement is that it does create hazardous byproducts. If we waited for every single advancement to be 100% safe for everyone and everything, we'd never create anything. The question is therefore what do the alternatives look like and are they any safer?

          In this case, the answers are:

          1. Fossil Fuels. Pretty much everyone except USians agrees that these are worse.

          2. Nuclear. Pretty much dead because of the same style safety fearmongering you're trying to spread about PV.

          • and the risk of hastening the cooling of the earth's core (and loss of the earth's magnetic field) for Geothermal

            Oh, come on. There's no risk of that. Most of the internal heat removed by geothermal energy systems is the product of radioactive decay in Earth's crust. And while the Earth is losing some of the core heat, today it's mostly shielded by the non-convecting mantle. There's pretty much zero risk of geothermal power doing anything to Earth's core.

            • The point was to show that all forms of energy production have their risks. (Regardless of chance of realization.) In response to the fearmongering of the GP. I'm not trying to discredit Geothermal energy. (Actually, I believe it to be a viable solution where it's deployable.)

    • A) Recycling solar cells is not problematic at all, it basically the same process as manufacturing them - idiot.
      B) Solar cells have a warranty of 30+ years, so infrastructure right ow only needs to be available for the very few solar cells produced 20 to 30 years ago

      No idea where the funky ANGST about solar cells comes from. You are scared about the "oh, we might have to simply put them into a landfill" more than by climate change and CO2? You must have some serious brain damage.

  • solar heating more. Seems to me we know how operate steam engines and creating massive heat sinks to absorb and redistribute said heat could really be a perfect use case for many areas. Hell heated highways in the winter time although not so sure the environmental folks will like that one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      Combining things that big trucks go on, get potholes, etc., with pipes to heat them isn't likely to be very cost-effective. It would be hard to put them shallow enough to heat the road and deep enough not to fail after a short life-span. It's a nice idea, but I don't see it happening.

  • Lead. Yes it's relatively abundant so yay for cheap production but when you eventually have to dispose of these what problems will be introduced?

    Does no one who's in to renewables think of 'life-cycle'?

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