• DOI:10.1038/513470A
• Corpus ID: 205082350

Cheap solar cells tempt businesses

@article{Noorden2014CheapSC,
  title={Cheap solar cells tempt businesses},
  author={Richard Van Noorden},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2014},
  volume={513},
  pages={470-470}
}

• Richard Van Noorden
• Published 25 September 2014
• Physics
• Nature

O lga Malinkiewicz, a PhD student studying photovoltaics at the University of Valencia in Spain, first heard about perovskites, the latest hope for low-cost solar power, in April last year. Unlike the slabs of purified silicon at the heart of the solar cells that currently dominate the market, perov-skites form thin films that are easily made in the lab by mixing together cheap salts. " I couldn't believe it was so simple, " says Malink-iewicz, who immediately tried it herself. A year later, she won a European student innovation prize, for coating flexible foil with perovskites. " After that, my telephone didn't stop ringing, " she says. " Investors were asking me all the time if I was going to start a company. " By May 2014, the excited 31-year-old had decided to do just that. In the past three months, she has moved from Spain to her native Poland, rented laboratory space in Wrocław, founded the privately backed company Saule Technologies, and rebuffed an offer of €1 million (US$1.3 million) for 10% of the fledgling firm — although she is yet to complete her PhD. Malinkiewicz's bold venture epitomizes how fast perovskites have zipped from academic curiosity to the brink of commercialization. In three years, competing research groups have tripled the cells' efficiency, achieving what took decades to accomplish for other solar materials. Large, commercial silicon modules convert 17–25% of solar radiation into electricity, and much smaller perovskite cells have already reached a widely reproduced rate of 16–18% in the lab — occasionally spiking higher. They are expected to top 20% in a few months, says Sang Il Seok at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology in Daejeon, whose lab holds the current record of 17.9%. " The results so far are truly spectacular, " says David Ginley, a researcher at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. The combination of low cost and efficiency means that perovskite cells could, in theory, make solar power — which currently provides less than 1% of the world's electricity — cheaper to generate than fossil-fuel energy, according to Henry Snaith, a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK (see Nature 504, 357–365; 2013). At a conference he convened in Oxford on 11–12 Sep-tember, perovskite researchers discussed the remaining barriers to the technology's commercial success. The cells, composed of perovskite film sandwiched between conducting layers, are still about the size …