One-year outdoor operation of monolithic perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells
Maxime Babics, Michele De Bastiani, Esma Ugur, Lujia Xu, Helen Bristow, Francesco Toniolo, Waseem Raja, Anand S. Subbiah, Jiang Liu, Luis Victor Torres Merino, Erkan Aydın, Shruti Sarwade, Thomas G. Allen, Arsalan Razzaq, Nimer Wehbe, Michaël Salvador, Stefaan De Wolf
Abstract
Perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells have gained significant attention as a viable commercial solution for ultra-high-efficiency photovoltaics. Ongoing research efforts focus on improving device performance, stability, and upscaling. Yet, paradoxically, their outdoor behavior remains largely unexplored. Here, we describe their performance over a complete calendar year outdoors in the area of the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia, which represents a hot and humid environment. After 1 year, our test device retains 80% of its initial power conversion efficiency. Further, we find three critical factors affecting current matching: the module temperature; deviations of the local, actual solar spectrum from the AM1.5G standard, which dictates optical design requirements of the subcells; and module soiling due to a spectrally non-uniform transmission of light through the accumulated dust. Overall, our results underline the promise of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells as a future high-performance technology, yet device tailoring toward targeted deployment may be desired to achieve maximum energy yields.