The Potential for Perovskite Solar Cells - Text Version

Below is the text version for the video The Potential for Perovskite Solar Cells.

My name is Joe Berry. I'm a senior scientist here at the National Renewable Energy Lab and I'm also the halite perovskite solar cell team lead.

The potential impact for perovskite solar cells is basically transformational. So if you look at the cost of existing PV technologies, even though they've dropped considerably, even though we see them a lot of places, they are still expensive, complex semiconductor systems that are very difficult to manufacture.

The potential for peroskivite solar cells is to essentially reduce the costs associated with manufacturability and
make them essentially ubiquitous technology. That is to say, you can put them everywhere you can literally paint them on the side of the building and everything then becomes something that can produce electricity and power.

So generally speaking perovskites are a large class of materials and that classification is based on its crystallographic structure and the thing that's unique about them is that they're entirely man-made kind of material - that is to say they aren't something that you'll find out in nature - and as a result of their physical properties they actually do an extremely good job of converting photons into electricity.

Perovskite solar cell materials are basically the active layer material that does the heavy lifting of a solar cell and they've only been essentially around for the last five years or so and their performance is already comparable to existing technologies.

There are a couple different things that make perovskites a unique solar cell material. The first is
that the performance is very, very spectacular. The second is the fact that, for the most part, most of these materials are made through solution processing. Those are processes that for example we make things like newspaper. Alright, newspapers. And because of what that means in terms of the scalability, that is unique in comparison to all the other PV technologies.

The one thing that I would want people to understand about perovskites is that it is still at a research stage but the technology is also moving very very quickly and this is really an opportunity for the country as a whole - and the world - to really develop a completely transformational clean energy technology.