A strategy for producing stable and commercially available perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has been proposed by Kai Zhu and Keith Emery at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in collaboration with Nam-Gyu Park (Korea), Michael Grätzel (Switzerland), and Tsutomu Miyasaka (Japan).
Solar cells using a halide perovskite with an organic cation such as methylammonium and/or formamidinium have attracted considerable attention because of their excellent photovoltaic performance. Over a period of just a few years, their power conversion efficiency has rocketed to greater than 22 percent.
However, PSCs face challenges to commercialisation. Specifically, they need long-term stability, a manufacturing method that can produce reproducible, hysteresis-free, high-performance devices and reliable device characterisation.
Nam-Gyu Park of Sungkyunkwan University initiated this joint effort to provide solutions to these needs, and the authors proposed a strategy-to move toward stable commercial PSCs.
The strategy incorporates the development of a reproducible manufacturing method that takes into account managing grain boundaries and interfacial charge transport and will use electroluminescence as an effective metric or tool for evaluating PSC quality. It will realise the importance of design of device structures with interface engineering to yield performance that is stable and hysteresis-free and will recover and utilise lead in PSCs in order to address environmental concerns. It will also ensure the advance of practical applications through reliable device characterisation.
Details of the strategy are found in the paper, "Towards Stable and Commercially Available Perovskite Solar Cells," published in Nature Energy.
The work at NREL is supported by the US Department of Energy SunShot Initiative, a collaborative national effort that aggressively drives innovation to make solar energy fully cost-competitive with traditional energy sources before the end of the decade. Through SunShot, the Energy Department supports efforts by private companies, universities, and national laboratories to drive down the cost of solar electricity to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
NREL is the US Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by The Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.
Image: Keith Emergy and Kai Zhu
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