Printed Perovskite Solar Cells for Large Area User Applications

Renewable energies provide clean, inexhaustible, and increasingly competitive energy source differing from fossil fuels in diversity, abundance, and potential for use. Solar energy capacity in European Union has been increasing in recent years with Germany, Spain and Poland leading the way in new installations. In 2022, the European Union added a record-breaking 41.4GW of solar power, increasing the total solar power capacity by 25%. Within the solar energy market, perovskite-based solar cells (PSCs) will contribute significantly towards the overall mix of solar energy due to PSCs differentiators compare to other solar Photovoltaic technologies of: (i) low-cost, (ii) excellent power-to-weight performance and (iii) high power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 25.7% at lab-scale in 2022, up from 3.8% in 2009. A key challenge of PSC technology is replication at large-scale as there is a substantial difference in performance from small-area cell (lab-scale) and large-area module performance. PERSEUS is designed to establish a foundation for PSC production and application development within Europe. The project will develop and demonstrate 3 different large area PSC architectures that offer broad adoption potential across multiple industries such as Floating Photovoltaics, Building Integrated and Applied Photovoltaics, Agri-Photovoltaics and Urban Photovoltaics. As each end-user requires different properties (e.g. performance, lifetime and cost targets), PERSEUS will develop parallel solutions to meet end-user needs covering: (1) single-junction opaque modules (2) semi-transparent modules and (3) 4T Perovskite + CIGS tandem module architectures. These will be translated into ‘blueprints’, of multi-stage manufacturing line(s) which have validated, matched outputs and allow immediate post-project progress to the commercialization phase.