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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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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