Column: China’s commodity import trend driven by prices, not economy
China's imports of major commodities are often viewed through the prism of the performance of, and outlook for, the world's second-biggest economy.
Scientists from the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and imec have fabricated a thin-film solar module stack made up of perovskite and Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS) with a conversion efficiency of 17.8%. For the first time, this tandem module surpasses the highest efficiencies of separate perovskite and CIGS modules.
The stacked module (3.76cm2) implements a fully scalable device concept: both the perovskite top module and the CIGS bottom module feature a monolithic interconnection scheme, using seven and four module cell stripes respectively. The result is a reduction of area loss of less than eight percent for both technologies.
The consortium’s process for creating this efficient perovskite/CIGS multi-junction solar module relies upon efficient exploitation of the solar spectrum. The higher energy part of the spectrum is harvested in the semitransparent perovskite module on top, while the light with lower energy passes and is harvested in the bottom CIGS cell. As a result, the prototype shows an unprecedented power conversion of 17.8%, which outperforms the world-record upscaled perovskite module of 15.3 percent efficiency presented by imec, and also the highly-efficient stand-alone upscaled CIGS module of ZSW with efficiencies nearing 15.7 percent.
According to Dr. Ulrich Paetzold, head of the research group at KIT, this result is just a starting point, with more exciting results to come in the next years such as perovskite/CIGS multi-junction solar modules surpassing efficiencies of 25%.
