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PHOTOVOLTAICS

Tandem cells under the weather

Nature Energy volume 5, pages 828–829 (2020)Cite this article

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The design of research solar cells is typically optimized for laboratory conditions but in the real world they are exposed to changing temperatures influencing their performance. Now, research from outdoor tests reveals how temperature alters the current of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells and how this changes the optimal bandgaps.

Solar cells are typically tested in the laboratory under the ideal condition of constant illumination and temperature. However, under realistic conditions, the spectral composition, incident angle and intensity of the incident light and the ambient temperature to which solar cells, encapsulated in a module, are exposed to will change during the day as a function of the sun elevation and the weather. These variations will affect the actual device performance — the energy yield — in the field. For established photovoltaic technologies such as silicon, researchers can predict the field performance of a solar cell based on the lab-measured efficiency. However, for emerging solar cells such as perovskite-based tandem cells, the influence of spectral and, to a larger extent, temperature variation on solar cell performance is not yet fully understood.

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Fig. 1: The effect of temperature on perovskite/silicon solar cells.

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  1. Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Enery Systems (ISE), Freiburg, Germany

    Jan Christoph Goldschmidt

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  1. Jan Christoph Goldschmidt
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Correspondence to Jan Christoph Goldschmidt.

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Goldschmidt, J.C. Tandem cells under the weather. Nat Energy 5, 828–829 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-00725-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-00725-1

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