Research and industry around the world are working on the commercialization of perovskite photovoltaics. In most research laboratories, the focus is on solvent-based manufacturing processes, as these are versatile and easy to use.
An international consortium led by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL, USA) has analyzed this critical gap between laboratory and industry. They emphasize: Industrially proven vacuum processes could contribute to rapid commercialization in perovskite solar cells with certain improvements. The vacuum-based production process currently incurs higher investment costs and is still lagging behind in terms of deposition speed, i.e. production throughput.
However, the authors present a number of possible solutions and estimate that it is competitive when real parameters such as electricity costs, production yield, material, decommissioning and recycling costs are taken into account.
In order for vacuum-based processes to fully exploit their scaling effects, the efficiency must be further increased and the speed of deposition must also be significantly increased.
