Cue Lemmy comments complaining about this being RND and people can’t buy 35% efficiency panels from Costco this weekend.
To put it into perspective, perovskite solar cells have had multiple headlines a month as a “breakthrough“ and “just around the corner” for more than ten years. I think those that follow this tech are just getting a little disappointment fatigue. Awesome tech though - I just hope they can make it stable enough to last in real world conditions soon.
Oxford PV set up a 100MW plant back in 2021… But that was with efficiency barely better than traditional mono (23-26.81% for mono vs. 28.6% for perovskite).
The value proposition was never there before, but it might be now…
Just saying that, with energy and medical scientific advancements, you’re often looking at decade long lead times before something is available for the masses. And humans famously suck at contextualizing things over long periods of time.
It’s normal to hear about R&D that is a decade or more from commercialization. It often takes a long time to secure investment for consumer applications, invent new mass manufacturing processes for a new technology, etc.
And I completely agree with you, it’s always going to take a while.
I just remember years ago when it was promising a 50% increase in efficiency, but then regular panels caught up and achieved that anyway. This game of cat and mouse has been running for Elon Musk’s Full Self Driving level timelines.
I believed the hype and in ~2020 decided to wait to add a 2nd array until perovskite panels were released “early next year”, and I’m still waiting 3 years later. I hear they will be produced early next year, so that’s something to look forward to.
If I cant have them at my front door by next friday I’m not interested 😤
Cue reality as R&D vs actually getting products to market are two HUGELY different things
All 99.99999% of science PR, will never be heard from again.
My panels are 12 years old and approx. 12% efficient, treble the power from the same roof space would be a very tempting upgrade, as long as the price does not go up too much.
treble the power
I have never felt so personally attacked by a SpongeBob meme.
Are you using thin film cells? That would explain this low value.
I just looked it up and it’s actually rated at 14% peak, but no it’s just the 2010/2011 series of Polycrystalline cells, it was a premium panel when I bought them.
I always remembered then to be somewhat better than those numbers and this paper agrees with me (figure 1). 14 % is not premium (efficiency) for polycrystaline in 2010. Figure 1 shows 20 % for polycrystaline at 2010 and 25 % for single crystal. Thin film, on the other hand, is down there at maybe 15 %.
In 2011 in my Region of the world (Europe) there were no commercially available panels to buy that could hit anywhere near 20%
I’ve not read this paper fully but I suspect it’s referring to lab testing, or panels produced in small numbers and 10x the cost of all other panels. Mine were REC240PE for reference.
Edit: that chart is titled “Best Research-Cell Efficiencies” so this is lab testing and it’s exactly the point of this thread… “35% Efficiency, Why is this not in stock at Costco!?!”
You are correct! Sorry for mixing this up. I must have looked at research Numbers back in the day and simply used that as my reference now, which of course is then correct if look at research again…
No problem, I remember researching the available panels at the time and selecting the most efficient and playing panel Tetris to get the most possible on the roof.
In the end the installer did a last minute switch, but although the panels were not the best available they were pretty close. The most annoying thing was that the panels were slightly different dimensions and the installer insisted in wider margins around the panels so I ended up with several fewer panels overall, ruining my carefully planned layout.
The main issue is with longevity, once they solve that, I am hopeful they will then this will dominate the Solar market completely and replace all the Silicon based single band gap panels. Even someone with relatively recent panels of 20-22% would benefit a lot from 35% panels, that is a lot of extra power in the same space.
