EU - SUNREY - Boosting sustainability, reliability and efficiency of perovskite PV through novel materials and process engineering

Perovskite PV are welcomed as an emerging technology for solar energy conversion, as today they afford high power conversion efficiency (PCE), higher than 25%. At the same time, perovskite semiconductors are based on abundant and low-cost starting materials and can be processed using simple and economic methods. The tuneable bandgap of the perovskite materials opens a lot of applications in a wide range of optoelectronic devices, even beyond solar cells. To ensure however economic feasibility and competitive levelized cost of electricity, the technology should offer long-term stability alongside high power conversion efficiency to match the reliability of silicon-wafer-based modules (the lifetime expectation for a PV module in a power plant is 20–25 years). At present, the long-term stability of lead halide perovskite modules does not meet this target and improvements are hampered by a lack of understanding of the cell and module failure modes. In addition to the intrinsic cell stability issues of perovskite PV, the usage of lead and scaling-up are the main challenges towards bringing perovskite technologies to the market.