Advances in solar technology could push us closer to cheap, clean energy

CBC

05-04-2025

Commercial solar energy technology based on silicon has taken amazing leaps in recent years, growing at a stupendous rate. But now, recent advancements in a different solar technology, which has long promised even cheaper and more efficient solar energy, could mean another great leap forward.
The technology is based on a crystalline structure found in a natural mineral called perovskite, discovered in 1839 in Russia's Ural Mountains and named after Russian mineralogist Lev Perovski.
It is the fourth-most abundant mineral on Earth, and can be synthetically made at a low cost. Often dubbed the " holy grail" of solar power by researchers for its potential, technology based on this structure is being tested for a number of applications including fuel cells, chemical catalysts, and solar cells — turning sunlight into electricity.
Perovskite solar cells can be made by creating a thin film of material out of metals, ions, and halogens, which result in a solar cell that is flexible, transparent and can be applied to a number of surfaces such as the touch screen of your phone or to the outside of a window.
Up to this point, research has focused on developing synthetic perovskites with higher power conversion efficiency, improving from a low of three per cent when the technology was first developed, to more than 25 per cent of the solar power being turned into energy. This makes for smaller, more powerful devices.
But a major hurdle still remains: durability. Unlike conventional silicon cells that can maintain their performance for decades, perovskites last a matter of hours or days before they begin to degrade due to chemical reactions with moisture in the air. This means there aren't many viable commercial applications.
According to new research published in the journal EES Solar in February, scientists in the U.K. have produced a new perovskite cell that increased the lifespan of a perovskite solar cell by a factor of ten.
By adding nanoparticles to the formula that delay the chemical degradation of the material, they created a device that lasted 1,530 hours, or a little over two months. That is still a long way from the years of durability necessary for most commercial applications, but it is encouraging.
There has been great hope for perovskite solar cells because they have the potential to produce low-cost solar energy in a wide variety of applications where conventional cells don't work.
One of the criticisms of conventional solar energy is the large areas of land required to capture enough sunlight to make useful power — land that might otherwise be used for agriculture.
Thin-film perovskites could help mitigate that problem because their transparency opens a whole range of other opportunities for deploying them.
Another new study, published in the science journal Nature on March 11, applied perovskite solar coatings to model greenhouses in a laboratory. The films reduced the intensity of incoming sunlight, somewhat.
But the plants grew successfully and even experienced less heat stress. Additionally, the solar cells produced enough electricity for artificial lighting, irrigation and air conditioning.
The same principle could be applied to windows in tall urban buildings. The thin films could be tinted to reduce bright sunlight in offices while supplying power to the building itself. When you add up all the glass towers in major cities, that's a lot of area.
Other experimenters are working with perovskites that can be incorporated into paint. It may be possible one day to apply solar paint to an entire building, so much of the outside surface of a house or commercial structure could act as a huge solar panel.
Perovskites have the potential to be incorporated into architecture so you won't even know they are present. There is even the possibility of indoor solar paint so the light from your lamps and light fixtures could be harvested by the walls and turned back into electricity.
And there is recent work to make every part of the perovskite solar cell recyclable, to make sure this futuristic technology is truly a sustainable solution to our power needs.
Much work needs to be done to bring perovskites to the commercial market, which means years before we are using solar paint on our houses. But with the potential to contribute to the production of clean energy in so many different ways, the long-term excitement around perovskites seems justified.