Imagine a solar panel so thin and flexible you could attach it to your home, car, smartphone or backpack and it would power any device. This technology may soon be a reality, thanks to the University of Oxford’s Physics Department, which may have made a major breakthrough that could be available to consumers in the near future.
The technology hinges on packing multiple layers of light-absorbing material into a single ultra-thin solar cell just one micron thick. By comparison, that’s just 0.00003937 inches, or 0.001 millimeters, smaller than some bacteria. Traditional photovoltaics are about 150 times thicker. The researchers said in a statement that the ultra-thin design allows the cells to be applied as a coating, making them more flexible without compromising efficiency.
The scientists plan to formally present their method for creating cells made from the mineral perovskite in a paper to be published in an academic journal later this year. The technology has already been certified by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan and has been proven to convert 27% of sunlight into electricity, a significant figure that matches or exceeds the average efficiency of conventional solar panel materials.
“After just five years of experimenting with stacking and multi-junction approaches, we’ve increased the power conversion efficiency from about 6% to more than 27%, which is close to the limit of what single-layer photovoltaics can currently achieve,” said Shuafen Hu, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford who worked on the project. “We believe that over time, this approach will enable photovoltaic devices to achieve much higher efficiencies, exceeding 45%.”
Some of the researchers behind this new technology are already working to commercialize perovskite solar cells: Oxford PV, founded by Henry Snaith, a professor at Oxford University who led the school’s photovoltaic research, has launched a large-scale manufacturing operation.
When most people think of solar energy, they imagine giant farms covered in gleaming panels, but perovskite solar cells promise to deliver renewable energy directly to homes, cars, and even clothing. Scientists have been hard at work in recent years to make solar power a more viable option, even going so far as to develop solar cells that can generate electricity not only from light but also from water. Scientists have been so successful that the price of solar power has fallen by more than 80% since 2010.
“We could envisage applying perovskite coatings to a wider range of surfaces, such as the roofs of cars, buildings and even the backs of mobile phones, to generate cheap solar power,” says Junke Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. “If we can generate more solar energy in this way, we could foresee less need to use silicon panels and build solar power plants in the long term.”
Given the urgent need to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions to prevent climate disaster, the shiny, power-generating knapsack future can’t come soon enough.
