Different testing in additional intense situations has discovered much less constructive outcomes, with one educational research discovering that perovskite cells in scorching 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’s going to occur in 30 years?
Since we don’t have years to check each new materials that scientists dream up, researchers typically put them via particularly punishing situations within the lab, bumping up the temperature and shining vivid lights onto panels to see how shortly they’ll degrade.
This form of testing is commonplace for silicon photo voltaic panels, which make up over 90% of the business photo voltaic market right now. However researchers are nonetheless figuring out simply how properly the correlations with recognized exams will switch to new supplies like perovskites.
One of many points has been that gentle, moisture, and warmth all contribute to the short degradation of perovskites. However it hasn’t been clear precisely which issue, or mixture of them, could be finest to use within the lab to measure how a photo voltaic panel would fare in the true world.
One research, revealed final yr in Nature, advised {that a} mixture of excessive temperature and illumination could be the important thing to accelerated exams that reliably predict real-world efficiency. The researchers discovered that high-temperature exams lasting only a few hundred hours (a few weeks) translated properly to just about six months of efficiency in out of doors testing.
Firms 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 properly these exams predict new applied sciences’ capacity to face up to the robust job a business 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.
