Putting a new kind of photovoltaic material on top of a conventional solar cell can boost overall power output by half. Researchers at Stanford University added a type of material known as a perovskite to a silicon solar cell, validating an idea for cheaply increasing the efficiency of solar power that was first proposed several years ago.
Perovskites are materials with a particular crystalline structure. The perovskite used by the Stanford team contains relatively abundant and cheap materials including ammonia, iodine, and lead.
Materials scientists started demonstrating the photovoltaic potential of perovskites in 2009. Since then, different research groups have created perovskites with photovoltaic efficiencies comparable to those of many commercial solar cells. But perovskites also convert certain parts of the solar spectrum into electricity more efficiently than silicon, and vice versa, so the biggest efficiency gain may come from using perovskites to augment, rather than replace, the silicon in most solar cells (see “A Material that Could Make Solar Power ‘Dirt Cheap’ and “What’s Tech is Next for the Solar Industry?”). Now researchers at Stanford have shown that the idea can work.
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