For UNSW Sydney’s Scientia Professor Martin Green—widely known as the father of modern photovoltaics—the future of solar power now depends not on an efficiency world record but on whether the next generation of solar cells can survive outside the lab.
Prof. Green has spent more than five decades helping solar power become a cheap source of electricity, with the technology he developed today underpinning 90% of the world’s solar technology.
Prof. Green joined UNSW as an academic in 1974 and set up a solar research group soon after. By the early 1980s, his group was known internationally.
In 1983, he and his team invented Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell (PERC) technology. This led to them then producing the world’s first officially confirmed 18% efficient silicon solar cell, beating the previous record of 16.5%.
That result pushed UNSW to the front of a field that included major US companies, NASA-linked programs, Japanese laboratories and other universities, with Prof. Green’s research team holding the record for silicon solar cell efficiency for much of the past four decades.
Last year, solar generated more electricity worldwide than nuclear for the first time, with the gap rapidly increasing.
Now, Prof. Green is helping establish an independent field-testing facility at UNSW’s Water Research Laboratory in Manly Vale, where the newest solar tech—perovskite solar modules—will be subjected to durability testing under real-world conditions.
Related article: 5 Minutes With: Scientia Professor Martin Green
Green says while these modules are already on the market, the expectation is that failed modules can simply be replaced as production scales and costs continue to fall.
“Silicon modules are routinely sold with warranties of 25 to 40 years,” Prof. Green says.
“While the perovskite modules offer similar warranties, the likelihood of a module surviving for that long is very small.”
Perovskites are a class of crystalline materials that can be stacked on top of silicon solar cells to harvest more sunlight and push solar performance further—the next generation of solar technology.
The new technology performs impressively in lab but is yet to survive for decades in the real world.
In the latest international solar cell efficiency tables published in Joule, Prof. Green records a large-area silicon cell reaching 28.1% efficiency and a tiny perovskite cell—not a full-size commercial module—reaching 28.0%. This is the first time the best single-junction perovskite result has effectively matched the highest silicon result.
The same report includes a 35.2% efficiency result for a perovskite-on-silicon tandem cell.
In a solar cell, a few percentage points make a massive difference. Higher efficiency means more electricity from the same rooftop, less land required for solar farms, with lower installation and infrastructure costs across entire energy systems.
The report’s latest numbers suggest solar is edging towards another technological shift—if the cells can last.
“Silicon, the workhorse of the global solar revolution, is now very efficient, but increasingly close to its limits,” Prof. Green says.
“And anyone who’s made a perovskite cell knows how unstable they are.”
Can perovskites make the same leap silicon did from promising technology to reliable infrastructure? This question is what shapes the field-testing facility.
Prof. Green says perovskite-on-silicon tandem cells are the most likely large-scale commercial pathway for next-gen solar technology.
“All the silicon manufacturers have their own perovskite-on-silicon programs,” he says.
When his group first began setting records with silicon cells, he insisted any claims be certified by recognised testing laboratories.
“If you’re claiming a record, you’ve got to have it independently certified,” he says.
That insistence on verification became a foundation of the modern solar industry. And it persists today through the independent field-testing facility Prof. Green is helping establish alongside his former student, UNSW’s Dr Jessica Jiang.
The facility will be able to install up to 160 modules, catering to all manufacturers and generations of products.
Many perovskite manufacturers are part of China’s rapidly expanding solar industry—and Prof. Green’s former students.
Related article: Solar pioneer Prof Martin Green wins top engineering prize
One of the largest perovskite manufacturers, Microquanta, was started by two former students.
Another former student is the founder of Suntech, Dr Zhengrong Shi, whose commercialisation of modern solar technology helped catalyse China’s rise as a global solar manufacturing powerhouse.
“Jessica has really good contacts within the Chinese industry, largely because they’re former students who now have important jobs in the industry,” Prof. Green says.
“She can WeChat them and the next day they’ll put a module in the mail.”
By comparing modules from different companies, the UNSW team hopes to identify which failure mechanisms are widespread and which are specific to individual designs.
“We’ll be able to provide an authoritative opinion about just how good the commercial ones are,” Prof. Green says.
“Once they fail in the field, we’ll find out why and provide that information back to the manufacturer,” he says.
“We really think we can push things along a bit.”
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