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10 Sep 2024
Oxford PV claims first commercial deployment of a perovskite tandem solar panel worldwide.
Oxford PV, the UK-German startup at the forefront of perovskite solar panel development, says that it has accomplished a key milestone in technology commercialization, with its first shipment.
Its tandem 72-cell panels, which combine silicon and perovskite materials to achieve a significant increase in solar conversion efficiency compared with silicon-only modules that currently dominate the market, are set to be deployed at a US-located solar farm.
“They will be used in a utility-scale installation, reducing the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) and contributing to more efficient land use by generating more electricity from the same area,” announced the firm, which is headquartered close to Oxford and has a manufacturing facility at Brandenburg an der Havel, near Berlin.
“This development marks the first commercial deployment of a perovskite tandem solar panel worldwide.”
The initial panels are quoted with a module efficiency of 24.5 per cent, and Oxford PV says that translates to around 20 per cent additional power generation compared with traditional silicon technology.
High-efficiency technologies
The achievement follows more than a decade of development work since the company was spun out of Oxford University, and recent research that has raised module efficiencies to nearly 27 per cent - well beyond that of the top-performing silicon-only panels currently available.
Company CEO David Ward said of the latest milestone: “The commercialization of this technology is a breakthrough for the energy industry. High-efficiency technologies are the future of the solar industry, and that future is starting now.
“With more electricity generation from the same area, perovskite technology is now helping utilities speed up this transition by offering more energy at a lower cost.”
John Bromley, the managing director of climate and clean energy investments at key partner Legal & General, added:
“At an early stage, we identified the huge potential of perovskites in high-efficiency solar power generation and we have supported Oxford PV to become a global leader, not only through multiple record-breaking efficiency achievements in the laboratory, but also on their path to commercialization of the technology.”
Emerging for photovoltaics applications largely within the past decade, the conversion efficiency of perovskite-only and silicon-perovskite solar cells has improved dramatically, thanks to a series of advances at Oxford PV, Chinese panel maker LONGi, Swiss laboratories CSEM and EPFL, and elsewhere.
LONGi record
Unlike many other high-efficiency solar materials, perovskites can be derived from readily available sources, and in combination with similarly cheap silicon cells can deliver tandem cells capable of performances that have typically been the preserve of more exotic - and expensive - compound semiconductors.
Oxford PV’s own research team set its record-breaking figure of 26.9 per cent with a 60-cell module earlier this year, and previously established a world-best of 28.9 per cent for an individual, commercial-sized cell.
Rival LONGi currently holds the NREL-certified record for a much smaller research cell, reaching 33.9 per cent late last year.
In June this year, the Chinese company’s research team claimed another advance, to 34.6 per cent, although it remains to be seen how effectively that “hero” performance can be translated to full-sized cells and commercial modules in a production setting.
As for its own future, Oxford PV says it plans to allocate production from its manufacturing site in Brandenburg an der Havel towards additional utility customers, as well as specialty products and pilot residential applications.
The firm is aiming to do that while also ramping production to the gigawatt scale at a future high-volume manufacturing site.
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