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Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

nature.com

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Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#21

Post by tlb »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #15
londons_explore wrote: post #7

The market need for cheaper solar cells seems to have evaporated, since the vast majority of the cost of solar projects these days is always in labour/land/wiring/inverters/grid connection/maintenance contracts. That means saving a bit of money on the panels in return for lower efficiency is never a good deal.

Labor costs are less when the weight is 10x less.

A little, but the design of the support structure is dominated by wind loads. Depending on where you are, it can need to survive wind gusts of 90 - 160 mph. At the low end, 90 mph corresponds to 1000 N / m^2, which is more than the weight of any kind of solar panel.

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#22

Post by pfdietz »

selimthegrim wrote: post #11
hackerlight wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some are trying to combine perovskite with silicon solar cells because they specialize at capturing different wavelengths. So-called tandem solar cells.

I wonder what happened to singlet fission cells and other things trying to get around the SQ limit

Still being worked on.

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/paderborns-new-sol...

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#25

Post by sandworm101 »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #10
londons_explore wrote: post #7

The market need for cheaper solar cells seems to have evaporated, since the vast majority of the cost of solar projects these days is always in labour/land/wiring/inverters/grid connection/maintenance contracts. That means saving a bit of money on the panels in return for lower efficiency is never a good deal.

If the materials are cheap enough, we might be able to build them into other stuff that was going to use labor anyway (shingles, asphalt, siding, etc). No idea what the economics of this look like though, and electricians (a pretty expensive form of labor) will need to be involved no matter what, but at least theoretically cheaper cells can also deal with labor costs.

>> other stuff that was going to use labor anyway (shingles, asphalt, siding, etc)

No. None of that ever works. Everyone has the "good idea" of cramming PV into some other product thinking that doing so will somehow reduce labor. It never does. Solar shingles are typical. They sound great but in reality require hundreds or thousands of electrical connections all spread over the moving flexible surface that is a wooden roof. You will be chasing electrical gremlins the moment the temperature shifts. And fixing any of those gremlins will involve penetrating the waterproofing, the core function of any roof. It is far easier to build and maintain a normal roof and then mount dedicated panels atop. The same too with siding. Want solar walls? Build normal walls and hang solar panels on them.

It is like building a computer into a desk. It seems like a great idea that will save space and keep your office tidy. There are lots of youtube videos about such builds. In reality, it is expensive on day one and extremely inconvenient to maintain in the long run. Nobody ever does it twice.

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#27

Post by pjc50 »

yareal wrote: post #17

As an outsider, what's the appeal of PeSC? The paper says they are less efficient and harder to manufacture, but also that they are the "next generation". I would have thought the next generation would be more efficient or easier to manufacture or both.

"Harder to manufacture" is relative. The hope is that they would be easier, because they're not monocrystalline and don't require the high energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method to produce a semiconductor substrate. The paper (and the general "pitch" of perovskites) plans to use roll-to-roll printing on flexible substrates.

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#29

Post by dr_dshiv »

Here is the graph of exponential installed solar capacity [1]. Like Moore’s law, continuous technological innovation and investment will be required to keep the pace. We just hit 1 terawatt— and doubling time seems to be about every 3 years. So… 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,512,1028, 2056 terawatts in 30 years?

With 20% capacity, that’s equivalent to >300,000 Million Tons of Oil (MToE) per year. Current global energy consumption is 14,000 MToE [2].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

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