As ultrathin organic solar cells hit new efficiency records, researchers see green energy potential in surprising places. LongReads
In November 2021, while the municipal utility in Marburg, Germany, was performing scheduled maintenance on a hot water storage facility, engineers glued 18 solar panels to the outside of the main 10-meter-high cylindrical tank. It’s not the typical home for solar panels, most of which are flat, rigid silicon and glass rectangles arrayed on rooftops or in solar parks. The Marburg facility’s panels, by contrast, are ultrathin organic films made by Heliatek, a German solar company.
Transparent organic photovoltaics are incorporated into the glass facade of the Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building at Michigan State University.Even when labmade OPVs look promising, scaling them to create full-size panels remains a challenge, but the potential is enormous. “Right now is a really exciting time in OPVs because the field has made huge leaps in performance, stability, and cost,” says Bryon Larson, an OPV expert at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Part of the difficulty in raising OPV efficiencies—then as now—is that they work differently from cells made from inorganic materials, such as silicon. All solar cells are sandwichlike devices, with semiconductors in the middle that absorb photons and convert that energy to electrical charges, which then migrate to metallic electrodes layered above and below.
Then the field suffered a double blow. First, progress plateaued as researchers struggled to find the next breakthrough material. Then a rival thin-film solar technology, called perovskites, burst on the scene. Perovskites are blends of organic and inorganic compounds that are cheap to make, easy to process, and great at capturing sunlight and turning it into electricity. While OPV progress stalled, the efficiency of perovskites skyrocketed from about 6.5% in 2012 to about 24% in 2020.
In contrast, OPVs remain niche products. Cheaper OPVs, such as the Heliatek devices, are hampered by low efficiencies, and more efficient ones are still experimental and costly. So, for now, Forrest says, it’s best for OPV manufacturers to target new markets where silicon isn’t suitable. “If you’re competing against silicon, go home, you’ve already lost,” he says.
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