Different testing in additional intense circumstances has discovered much less optimistic outcomes, with one educational examine discovering that perovskite cells in scorching and humid Saudi Arabia misplaced 20% of their effectivity after one 12 months of operation. 

These outcomes are for one 12 months of testing. How can we inform what’s going to occur in 30 years? 

Since we don’t have years to check each new materials that scientists dream up, researchers typically put them by way of particularly punishing circumstances within the lab, bumping up the temperature and shining brilliant lights onto panels to see how shortly they’ll degrade. 

This type of testing is normal for silicon photo voltaic panels, which make up over 90% of the industrial photo voltaic market in the present day. However researchers are nonetheless figuring out simply how properly the correlations with recognized checks will switch to new supplies like perovskites. 

One of many points has been that gentle, moisture, and warmth all contribute to the short degradation of perovskites. However it hasn’t been clear precisely which issue, or mixture of them, can be finest to use within the lab to measure how a photo voltaic panel would fare in the true world. 

One examine, revealed final 12 months in Nature, recommended {that a} mixture of excessive temperature and illumination can be the important thing to accelerated checks that reliably predict real-world efficiency. The researchers discovered that high-temperature checks lasting only a few hundred hours (a few weeks) translated properly to just about six months of efficiency in out of doors testing. 

Corporations say they’re bringing new photo voltaic supplies to the market as quickly as this 12 months.  Quickly we’ll begin to actually see simply how properly these checks predict new applied sciences’ capacity to face up to the powerful job a industrial photo voltaic panel must do. I do know I’ll be watching. 

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Learn extra about why super-efficient tandem photo voltaic cells made our record of 10 Breakthrough Applied sciences in 2024 right here.