Green Energy

The global oil crisis of today has much in common with similar price shocks in years past, except for one thing. Today, solar power claims a rapidly growing slice of the global energy pie, and the best is yet to come. Another round of activity is stirring in the area of perovskite solar cells, aimed at paring down costs, improving solar conversion efficiency, and deploying high volume manufacturing systems. Considering Trump’s war on Iran, domestic supply chain advantages are also in play.

Perovskite solar cells have been a long time coming. The solar conversion potential of the finicky material perovskite first emerged back in 2009. Researchers have spent the past 17 years developing a series of more efficient iterations while also taming the material’s behavioral issues (see lots more perovskite background here).

While all that has been going on, perovskite stakeholders have also been fine-tuning the manufacturing process. Perovskite material lends itself to low-cost, high volume roll-to-roll systems. Similar to printing a newspaper, perovskite solar cells can be rendered in a solution, which can be sprayed or printed onto a flexible film.

One recent development in that area emerged on March 11, when the Dutch independent research organization TNO (the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) announced a new perovskite solar cell manufacturing venture called Pervion Technologies.