Qcells, a subsidiary of South Korea’s giant conglomerate Hanwha Corp, has set a world record for the efficiency of a large-area silicon solar cell with a top layer of perovskite, a development that could dramatically shrink the size of projects and slash costs. Qcells says it has achieved cell efficiency of 28.6% on a large commercial-sized cell known as an M10 using the technology, considerably higher than 27% efficiency for crystalline silicon cells and around 21% for traditional commercial silicon solar panels. To be fair, China’s Longi has achieved efficiency breakthroughs above 30%; however, that was for much smaller cells.
“If you have 100 solar panels in the field, but you can get the same power output for only 60 or 80 of them, now you’re digging less holes, you’re using less rails, you have less labor to install it,” Danielle Merfeld, Qcells’ chief technology officer, told Reuters.
Qcells’ discovery comes at…
