Super efficient solar cell

Super efficient solar cell

There’s a lot of excitement about a class of materials called perovskites that promise to deliver efficient and cheap solar cells. Watching progress in perovskite research is fascinating because perovskites have been able to boost their efficiencies — the percentage of available sunlight that they convert to electricity — more rapidly than any other solar cell material that has been mass produced or being developed in labs.

In fact, efficiency figures jumped from around 10 percent to 20 percent in mere two years.

So what is a perovskite? The name came from a minerologist, Lev Perovski, and was given to a material discovered in Russia’s Ural Mountains in 1839. That compound was calcium titanium oxide.

The perovskite compounds that are being tinkered with to make solar cells aren’t calcium titanium oxide at all, but they do share the same crystalline structure. For example, Oxford Photovoltaics, a U.K. startup that hopes to be among the first

 to commercialize its perovskite technology, uses organicmetallic halide to create that same crystalline structure. The compound contains methylammonium, lead, iodine and chlorine and can absorb a greater spectrum of sunlight than silicon, the material that makes up over 80 percent of the solar cells on the market today.