Researchers from the French National Institute of Solar Energy (INES) – a division of the French Alternative Energy and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) – and Italian renewable energy specialist Enel Green Power claim to have achieved an energy conversion efficiency of 29.8% for a dual-terminal perovskite-silicon solar cell.
The cell consists of an upper cell based on a perovskite absorber and a lower cell with a heterojunction (HJT) structure. It has an active area of 9 cm² and an open-circuit voltage of more than 1,900 mV.
The European solar test facility of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC) has certified the result.
The scientists said the new result is an improvement over the 28.4% efficiency they achieved in June for the same type of cell.
“The decisive factor is the ability of our researchers to advance the Tandem towards an industrialization made possible by the choice of materials that, by working closely with CEA at INES, has allowed us to develop this technology scale to areas larger than cm²,” said Cosimo Gerardi, Chief Technology Officer at Enel’s 3Sun unit.
CEA-INES and Enel did not reveal any additional technical details.
Enel Green Power, through its unit 3Sun, is betting on an n-type heterojunction (HJT) cell with an efficiency of 25.5% for its new 3 GW solar module factory now under construction in Catania, southern Italy. It was recently said that this could lead to module efficiency of more than 24%.
Enel Green Power plans to offer even more efficient solar panels based on tandem silicon-perovskite cells from 2026. The final products will reportedly achieve an efficiency of approximately 30%.
CEA-INES and Enel Green Power have jointly developed DC/DC maximum power point trackers (MPPT). They are also working on high-efficiency double-sided PV panels. Furthermore, they achieved an energy conversion efficiency of 24.47% for a gallium-doped p-type heterojunction silicon solar cell in March 2022.
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