Different testing in additional intense circumstances has discovered much less optimistic outcomes, with one educational research discovering that perovskite cells in sizzling and humid Saudi Arabia misplaced 20% of their effectivity after one yr of operation.
These outcomes are for one yr of testing. How can we inform what is going to occur in 30 years?
Since we don’t have years to check each new materials that scientists dream up, researchers usually put them via particularly punishing circumstances within the lab, bumping up the temperature and shining vibrant lights onto panels to see how shortly they’ll degrade.
This kind of testing is customary for silicon photo voltaic panels, which make up over 90% of the industrial photo voltaic market in the present day. However researchers are nonetheless figuring out simply how nicely the correlations with recognized checks will switch to new supplies like perovskites.
One of many points has been that mild, moisture, and warmth all contribute to the fast degradation of perovskites. Nevertheless it hasn’t been clear precisely which issue, or mixture of them, can be greatest to use within the lab to measure how a photo voltaic panel would fare in the actual world.
One research, revealed final yr in Nature, steered {that a} mixture of excessive temperature and illumination can be the important thing to accelerated checks that reliably predict real-world efficiency. The researchers discovered that high-temperature checks lasting only a few hundred hours (a few weeks) translated nicely to almost six months of efficiency in out of doors testing.
Corporations say they’re bringing new photo voltaic supplies to the market as quickly as this yr. Quickly we’ll begin to actually see simply how nicely these checks predict new applied sciences’ capacity to resist the powerful job a industrial photo voltaic panel must do. I do know I’ll be watching.
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Learn extra about why super-efficient tandem photo voltaic cells made our record of 10 Breakthrough Applied sciences in 2024 right here.
