This Breakthrough Solves Perovskite Solar’s BIGGEST Problem
with solar panels go solar solar energy so is
solar right for you these things are absolutely solid solar panels are great but there is a more
efficient technology than your average PV cell and that is this these are pery solar cells promising
to unlock PV cell efficiencies a 100 times higher than current commercial cells but here's the
thing the reason why we don't see them on our houses today is that at worst they last a couple
of days and at best about a year and that's under lab conditions but that's about to change recent
breakthroughs in perky synthesis increased our lifetimes by an order of magnitude and at least
one company seems to have cracked the durability problem and will release the first commercially
available Prof Sky solar panel within the year so what does this mean for you and me let's figure
this out together I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci This video is sponsored by ECOFLOW a
typical solar panel that you can go out and buy today has has a power conversion efficiency
of around 20% that means for every 100 watts of solar energy that hits the panel only about 20
watts of electricity is actually produced those panels are made of silicon the same semiconductor
that we use in computer chips but a new type of panel with perov Sky solar cells is about to hit
the market with a 25% efficiency now that might not seem like that big of a difference but that
increas in efficiency could slash a solar system like the one I have in my house down from 30,000
to just $20,000 that is a $10,000 difference for how many of you guys would that amount of money
change your decision to either go solar or not s off in the comments below and by the way the
difference in price is only the tip of the iceberg of what pavy solar promises but we'll
get back to that here in a minute first you're probably wondering how can such a small change
in efficiency make such a big difference in cost so to figure this out I asked myself what would
change if I went from 20% efficient panels like the ones I have on my roof to panels that were 20
5% I had to install 30 400 W panels for my 12 KW system if I had used 25% efficient panels I would
have only needed to install 24 of them for the same size system but it's not just the reduction
the number of panels one day prop Sky panels will probably even be cheaper than our panels today
but we'll get back to that also in a minute but by reducing the number of panels you need saves you
money in quite a few different ways for example the labor cost to install 24 panels is going
to be cheaper than 30 plus you need less rack to install them all and you can potentially put
more panels or get more energy out with a limited roof space we ran into this very problem on our
office which is a one-bedroom one bath little house and we didn't have all that much room and we
maximized as much solar as we could but the truth is we put some panels in a place where there's
some tree shading and other things that we could have gotten away from if we had more efficient
panels Prof Sky solar cells are a type of solar technology that use a family of materials called
Prof Skypes to convert sunlight into electricity these Pro skites are materials that have a similar
structure to a mineral made of calcium titanium trioxide and called pery in honor of the Russian
minerology who discovered it this mineral forms little cubic crystals that look like this any
material with this general formula abx3 and whose crystal structure looks like this is a Prof guy AB
andx can be almost anything so you can tweak those materials by changing the ions in the formula and
fine-tuning them for different applications one of these apption is solar cells and most of the
research in the last 10 years has focused on lead Halli per skites with record-breaking efficiencies
so amazing PR skite going to be great right but they're not everywhere yet like many things we
talk about so why is that well it's kind of simple here there's a trade-off the oxygen and moisture
in the air the Heat and the Sun's UV rays all work together to destroy pery cells and it's kind
of ironic isn't it sunlight the very thing this thing is made to harness is the very thing that
destroys it and to be fair UV light is destructive to almost anything I can't go more than about 12
minutes in the sun myself but anyways the sunlight can break this down and sometimes early Prof Sky
cells wouldn't even last more than a couple of days before degrading compare that to my silicon
panels that I have on my roof right now that will last over 30 years and produce about 80% of
their current output 30 years from now it's pretty amazing in fact while recording this video one of
the things I think we have to just take a moment to appreciate is how good solar panels are today
out in the sun all day and night no maintenance no oil changes no nothing else just producing
electricity pretty amazing I challenge you to name one thing besides your house that can last over 30
years under the sun with minimal to no maintenance by the way not even the asphalt shingles on my
roof will last as long as my panels will now we're all after the next great breakthrough and
solar panels or batteries but it's also important to step back and realize how far our current Tech
has come I paid about $150 per panel this year for 400 watt panels it's amazing and now we're in the
Golden Age of batteries and our sponsor this week ecoflow and their latest generation Delta Pro
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this can now put 8,000 Watts for a instantaneous period of time and that had no problem dealing
with that my favorite new features in the past 3 months of having this thing are number one it's
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amazing this is one of the quietest batteries I've ever seen number two standby time I did a test I
charged it to 100% and left it unused for 30 days and I came back and it had 99% capacity and the
battery can output both 120 volt like before but it can even do 240 volt for larger appliances and
now the Delta Pro 3 has two solar charging ports a low voltage good for 1,000 watts and a high
voltage good for 1,600 for a total of 2600 watts of solar input now this isn't some small battery
but it retains that beautiful design wheels and handle so you can take it anywhere and you're
going to want to because it can handle pretty much anything what makes this battery so versatile is
that it has four 20 amp 120 Outlets a 240 Outlet a Nema l1430 30 amp outlet and even direct DC
outputs like two 100 W USBC charging ports as well and of course you can always hook this up
to your house like we do we have a smart home panel too in our office and this plugs right in
to charge and back up your house in the event of a power outage now I know going solar and getting
batteries can be expensive and complicated but this is your gateway this thing can both take
in solar input and provide Power if the power goes out roll this thing in if the power goes out
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now back to the show the point is we need to fix perov Sky's durability problem and apparently
that's a tough challenge although one company from the UK says they solved it there are several ways
Engineers have tried to solve the durability issue the most straightforward has been to encapsulate
the cell to protect it from the environment but that only solves part of the problem another
important part of the issue has to do with the internal structure itself and nothing to do with
air or sunlight and you can't fix that by just encapsulating the cell two recent discoveries have
helped increase cell Life by orders of magnitude the first discovery was made by yanan zo and his
team from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and was published in nature energy they
looked closely at all the tiny little crystals with an electron microscope and discovered
that they had a secret structure no one had ever noticed before they were covered with little
concavities these were like little indentations that strained the crystal structure making it
unstable the Breakthrough is that they figured out a way to make the propy material from scratch
without these concavities all they had to do was add a type of surfacant something like a detergent
whose name I'm not even going to try and pronounce the concavities were gone the resulting cells
lasted 1,500 hours under different stress tests compared to only 500 before but before we get too
excited let's remember that 1500 hours is only about 2 months under sunlight or around 4 months
of actual field application so not that great but it is still a threefold increase and it's not the
only breakthrough the next breakthrough came from the same research team and was also published
in nature in this case they looked at the Prof Sky's internal structure instead of the surface
they found that the little crystals were full of tiny imperfections which also made them unstable
by shining a violet blue 500 M laser for 5 minutes on those parts of the crystal when making the
film and during aging they were able to fix those imperfections and force the ions to form
the perky structure the result was that the cells retained Almost 100% of the original performance
in terms of efficiency after 2 hours or 3 months under simulated daylight conditions at such low
degradation rates these cells could potentially last 5 to 10 years before degrading to less than
80% of their original performance but hear me out what if we could combine this breakthrough
with the earlier one about removing the surface concavities could we triple those 5 to 10 year
claims and finally make Prof Sky cells that can last as long as traditional panels I actually
think it's possible and and so does the company Oxford PV I get excited when I find breakthroughs
like these that make technology advance in huge leaps but these reports are only in the lab
scaling from Lab to industrial production is the bane of any engineer's existence and I
know you feel me on this one how many times do researchers yell that this will change everything
only to not really change anything I mean we see it all the time right the Sol State batteries
or some new Next Generation Fusion reactor that's kind of the hard part about engineering
is taking it all the way to the Finish Line the spin-off company from Oxford University partnered
with fronhofer Institute of solar energy systems to make the world's first commercially available
pavy silicon tandem solar panel and I'll explain what that means here in a minute but at
25% efficiency it'll be the most efficient commercially available solar panel in the world
the panel will be 1.68 m in size and produce 421 Watts they're also working on a profs solar
cell in an M6 format with a efficiency of 26.8% but it's still low volumes and a little early
for that they haven't released full figures on exactly how long these panels would last but
if they're going commercial I'm guessing it's not going to be just a couple of months or years
they have to be competitive with current panels otherwise it would be a business nightmare for
them other companies are also working on this technology Q cells is developing a 26% efficient
commercial side module that can last 30 years saw Technologies from Poland Japan prints props
skites on large sheets of flexible plastic but none of them are at commercial scale just yet
so if Oxford PV really has solved the durability issue this could be pretty big this could be
the biggest Le forwarded solar energy of the decade because tandem cells have the potential to
more than double our current panel efficiencies in theory they could go all the way up to 43%
with the current world record holder standing currently at 33.9 now if you're thinking how can
they manage to break the shockly quazar limit of 30% efficiency they did it by sandwiching two
cells together a NE feature of peros skites is that they are great at absorbing visible light
but they're transparent to infrared light which silicon cells are great at absorbing so you can
sandwich the two together and got a parasite silicon tandem cell that absorbs much more
light some of the other really key benefits by the way of perov skites is that they require very
cheap and abundant raw materials they are easily processed and you can make them almost at room
temperature by mixing Solutions on a substrate level silicon cells in contrast require High
Purity silicon that is processed at over 1,000° C and since Prof skites are great absorbing light
you can make them super thin you can actually make a high performance prop Sky cell just 0.15 microns
thick that's a thousand times thinner than a human hair which by the way is about how thick silicon
cells are so you can make prop Sky cells using less than 1 1,000th of the material Mass compared
to Silicon so all of those benefits are the reason why this technology gets so much attention and
research and development but they're not perfect remember from earlier that I mentioned that
they're made with lead compounds and Lead is toxic and a strong pollutant there are non-leed
variants but they're nowhere near as good as the lead Hy based cells so Recycling and Disposal will
be a huge issue for the these panels especially if they don't last as long as silicon panels besides
the longevity and degradation problem this is new technology so there's still many many more hurdles
in terms of manufacturing and scaling production another big issue is certification these cells
perform differently from Silicon cells and haven't been studied for nearly as long so we don't have
that much information about how they'll perform 20 or 30 years from now and we definitely do with
silicon and by the way my first solar panel system on my old house is turning 15 years old pretty
soon and they're still doing great at around 92% of their original output so we just have more
data for traditional panels if someone walked up to you and said listen here's a solar system for
your house that costs half the price but it last 15 years instead of 25 would you do it so clearly
parav skites just might be good enough to replace solar panels but to really answer that question
we got to answer the levelized cost of energy or the LC e check this out so I made this little
calculator and we'll put a link to how you can access it and play with the parameters yourself
but as you can see because the Prof Sky panels are 25% efficient instead of 20% we only need 24
panels and as a rough estimate 150 is what I paid previously for my last set of solar panels and if
they can get the cost down to 50 which is probably not practical but if they did the install cost was
the same and as you can see the prop Sky system will cost 21,600 while the the traditional panel
that I have cost about $330,000 now that's over $8,000 in savings upfront and that's a big reason
why Prof skite might have a shot but there's a lot more to it if we keep going down the line You'll
see that the panel lifetime is 25 years for my panels really it's probably more than that but
let's just call 25 and if they can get the perov SC up to 12 years right inflation rate the annual
maintenance is $500 honestly I don't pay anything for maintenance but this is a number that people
often use um maybe it's for larger scale plants but let's just leave it at 500 for the sake of
argument and finally the price of the energy which is 35 cents here maybe your is cheaper you
can adjust it again you can make it yourself and if I hit calculate you'll see that this is what my
system will be producing I specified a 12 kilowatt system so this is kind of throughout the year how
much energy will be produced it looks like we'll make 18.5 megawatt hours a year and here is the
LC Coe calculation so for the traditional system I've got $47,000 total cost which is The Upfront
plus the maintenance over the years this is how much energy it'll produce and the lcoe is just
11 cents per kilowatt hour the profs guy even with that cheaper upfront price is still 14 cents
and here's kind of the breakdown as time goes by by year 12 the Prof sky goes away because it's
been decommissioned while the main system keeps going so Prof sky still doesn't quite get there
but let's see if we could make Prof skite last for [Music] 16 okay close so I think 17 would do
it so at 17 years it would break even so basically what I'm trying to say is that a pav skyp panel
would have to last 17 years if a traditional panel lasts 25 for this to actually make sense otherwise
you're better off just getting traditional panels yes there's a larger upfront but the lcoe doesn't
lie and that's kind of how it falls now when we talk about the tandem panels that would be even
more expensive that would be in the realm of maybe double the price of a traditional panel and that
would have an even tougher time unless they last significantly longer so are we getting closer yes
we are Prof skes are kind of on the horizon and maybe for special use cases where the materials
degrading and having to be replaced isn't as big of a deal as the added efficiency maybe we'll
start seeing that like the next couple of years and then hopefully they can figure out how to
make them last 17 years or longer and then we're in business like I mentioned tubid vin.
You can
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so definitely head over to two bit da Vinci all right thank you so much for watching and you
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