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.
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.
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…
Yeah, all these super-efficient panels are all well and good but like you said they’ve been promised for over a decade and have yet to leave the lab due to a bunch of different problems such as stability for these organic hybrids. I wonder if these newest ones have actually managed to solve the stability problem, or is this yet another cell revolution that’ll be coming Real Soon Now™ in 2034
But let’s go back in time 10 or 15 years. Back then people were buying stuff that was around 12 to 14% efficient. Now people are buying stuff that is 19% to 22% efficient. That’s a big ass jump in efficiency over a decade.
The tech is rolling out, it just takes time to move stuff from R&D to manufacturing at scale and at a reasonable cost.
There is often a long lead time between the breakthrough science, new industrial applications, and when you can buy something at HomeDepot. It’s always going to be that way.
Oh yeah I was specifically talking about all these new technologies, not just incremental improvements on the existing ones. Hybrid organic cells have been promised for a long time and it’s not just a question of scaling etc., but that they have had serious issues that have so far meant that they were a complete non-starter for any actual real-world use. I didn’t look into this any further so I don’t know of Longi solved the stability problem, though, so it may be that they’re finally actually ready to even start leaving the lab
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.
Is longevity currently a deal breaker?
Asking because I’m pretty sure just saw an article about solar panels from the 90s that were still working at 70+% capacity
It’s an issue for perovskite cells. “Traditional” silicon cells (which makes up probably 90+% of current installs) last 40+ years.
Thanks for the info
Longevity issues combined with harmful rare mineral extraction kinda eats ass in the long run
Worse the the status Quo though?
