Scientists from the University of New South Wales in Australia, in collaboration with UtmoLight, have enabled a 30 cm × 30 cm perovskite solar cell with an aperture area of 676 cm² to achieve a photoelectric conversion efficiency of 23.5%, 0.6 percentage points higher than the previous benchmark, setting a world record for the conversion efficiency of large-area perovskite solar cells.

This world record demonstrates that perovskite solar technology can maintain high efficiency even when scaled up to an area larger than laboratory cells (typically about 1 cm²), highlighting its potential for scalable manufacturing and widespread use in solar modules. Moreover, the latest advance is not just a new efficiency record, but also lies in the materials and devices used in the research, which can move from laboratory cells to industrial applications.

Perovskite is widely regarded as a highly promising next-generation solar material. It can efficiently convert sunlight into electricity and offers the prospect of low-cost manufacturing. One promising research direction is to stack it with traditional silicon cells to form tandem solar cells. The two absorb different bands of the solar spectrum, working together to convert more sunlight into electricity. In the future, perovskite is expected to serve as an additional layer, increasingly stacked on top of existing silicon cells, allowing manufacturers to increase power output without proportionally expanding the area.

However, perovskite is not yet up to widespread photovoltaic applications. Once exposed to moisture, heat, and prolonged sunlight, it degrades, posing enormous challenges to long-term stability, durability, and reliable large-scale manufacturing. In addition, the larger the perovskite module, the more necessary it is to precisely control the uniformity, crystallization, and defects of the module over a large area, as well as electrical interconnectivity, among other factors. Scaling up from small laboratory samples is a hurdle at every step that is difficult to overcome.

In addition, traditional perovskite solar cells usually require a layer of nickel oxide to prevent short circuits. But nickel oxide can also react adversely with perovskite, creating hidden risks of instability.

In the latest research, the team used material innovation and a different cell manufacturing approach to eliminate the nickel oxide layer, which not only simplified the process but also improved the photoelectric conversion efficiency of the resulting cell.

The team plans to manufacture a full-size module with an area of 2.8 m² in the coming months, which is exactly the size of commercial photovoltaic modules, while also pushing efficiency testing to a larger scale to further validate the results. They expect larger perovskite cells to achieve efficiencies of 18% to 19%. However, for this technology to be widely adopted, continued efforts are still needed in efficiency, repeatability, and long-term stability.