Imec and its Solliance partners have fabricated for the first time a semi-transparent perovskite PV-module, achieving power conversion efficiencies up to 12%, a world-best achievement, according to the R&D group.
The semi-transparent perovskite modules showed efficiencies of 12% on sizes as large as 4cm2 and 10% efficiencies on sizes as large as 16cm2.
Imec noted that the optical and electrical properties of the perovskite solar cells can be varied by tuning the composition of the material components and thereby adjusting color and transparency and fabricated with commercially available coating and printing techniques.
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Imec also noted that its novel stacked module concept features a highly transparent perovskite solar module stacked on top of an interdigitated back contacted (IBC) silicon solar cell that shows a 70% transmission of light towards the crystalline Si solar cell, resulting in a conversion efficiency of 20.2% on a 4cm2 module. On a larger area (16cm2) substrate employing a Si bottom solar module of 4 interconnected IBC cells, conversion efficiencies of 17.2% were achieved.
Tom Aernouts, Thin Film PV Technology Manager at imec said, “We are proud about these results as they show we have excellent control over the performance as well as the upscaling capabilities of this technology. Our future work will continue in increasing module sizes and optimizing the perovskite solar cell technology.”
“With a [millimetre]-size perovskite solar cell stacked on our IBC solar cell even efficiency as high as 22% has been obtained. But advancement of the perovskite/Si stacked solar module technology relies on demonstrators of realistic sizes,” added Ulrich Paetzold, researcher at the Thin Film PV group at imec.
The Solliance partners recently created a perovskite mini-module with 10% conversion efficiency with an aperture area of 168 cm2, deployed with 25 serial connected cells through an optimized P1, P2, P3 interconnection technology.