Electrical Equipment / Components & Telecoms

A 10-year-old Chinese start-up growth company, Dazheng Micro & Nano Technology, has become the world's first company to mass-produce flexible perovskite solar modules with a promised efficiency of 21%.

Limited by expensive raw materials and complex manufacturing processes, traditional flexible thin-film solar cells have high costs and limited applications. Taisho's new flexible perovskite solar cells are promising due to their low cost and simpler fabrication process.

In addition, this battery has higher efficiency and better stability. Taisho is fabricated using a combination of wet-chemical methods and roll-to-roll line PVD deposition, the latter of which was first demonstrated by researchers in Japan, and Taisho has brought this technology to a level that can be mass-produced.

Taizheng claims that the company has invested 80 million yuan ($11.8 million) to build a 10MW annual production line in China's Jiangsu province, which has some of the largest PV suppliers. The 40cm x 60cm components will be cut into small pieces and shipped to smartphone and tablet manufacturers in China.

Taisho currently plans to invest another 200 million yuan to expand its annual production capacity to 100MW.

Perovskite solar cells are light, with an initial power conversion efficiency of about 10 percent, about half that of silicon cells. Perovskite materials generally have a typical perovskite crystal structure (ABX3). Perovskite materials suitable for optoelectronic devices are composed of organic or inorganic groups at A, B, and X sites, and their semiconducting properties can be tuned by adjusting the composition.

Because of their direct band gap, their absorption coefficient is much higher than that of silicon, and 500-nanometer-thick perovskite films can absorb most visible light. In photovoltaic applications, photon-induced excitons have longer lifetimes, which brings high defect tolerance and low purity requirements of 98%. Meanwhile, perovskite films can be prepared by solution methods below 130 °C, which is much lower than that of crystalline silicon. As a result, the complexity, material cost, and manufacturing energy consumption of perovskite solar cell production equipment are far lower than those of silicon-based solar cells and other existing photovoltaic technologies.

Thanks to their flexibility, they open up a whole new area of potential use, be it windows, walls, large vehicles, etc.

By mass-producing large modules, Taisho has successfully reduced the price difference with silicon cells to 3 times, and is confident to further reduce this difference to 2 times. At this price, or the price of silicon cells in 2015, the possibilities for flexible solar energy use are endless.