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Presented by: Prof Henry J. Snaith
Bink Professor in Renewable Energy
Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, England
Abstract:
Photovoltaic (PV) solar energy is already the least expensive form of producing electricity in many geographic locations. The industry is set to increase in scale by at least another order of magnitude over the next 20 years, and many technological innovations are being developed and implemented at the laboratory scale, implying that the roadmap for progress will continue to deliver efficiency and power output gains for decades to come. Altogether, it is inevitable that a significant fraction of our future, clean and sustainable power generation capacity will be met with PV. One of the most exciting new materials, poised to deliver significant efficiency gains for solar PV, is metal halide perovskites. These materials were only found to be useful for solar energy conversion a little over a decade ago, and since then the performance of a solar cell fabricated with thin-films of metal halide perovskites has reached the performance of the very best silicon PV cells. By stacking multiple layers of perovskite on top of each other, or by coating silicon with perovskites in so called tandem or multi-junction cells, even higher efficiencies can be achieved, with record efficiencies of perovskite-on-silicon tandem cells surpassing 34% (in comparison with 27% for record silicon alone). Despite the progress, there remain naysayers, largely pointing towards the unproven stability of metal halide perovskites and also the reliance upon lead in the most efficient and most stable perovskite materials. In this lecture I will describe some of the key steps in the early development of metal halide perovskite PV, I will address sustainability and toxicity and highlights some of the key research challenges opportunities and recent progress. I will finish with an overview of the industrial progress towards delivering a reliable, scalable, and sustainable PV perovskite technology.
Bio:
Henry Snaith is the Binks Professor of Renewable Energy at Oxford University, UK and co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Oxford PV and Helio Display Materials. He works on new materials and devices for photovoltaic solar energy conversion and optoelectronic applications. Prof Snaith’s multidisciplinary work ranges from new material synthesis and discovery, through device engineering, advanced spectroscopic characterization and theoretical modeling. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, for “starting a new field of research attracting both academic and industrial following”. He has won numerous awards and accolades, including the Leigh Ann Conn Prize for Renewable Energy, the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award, The Becquerel Prize in Photovoltaics, being named one of “Natures Ten” people who mattered, and topping the rank of the world’s “most influential scientific minds”.