Perovskite/Silicon Tandem Solar Cells: Marriage of Convenience or True Love Story? – An Overview

Abstract

Perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells have reached efficiencies above 25% in just about three years of development, mostly driven by the rapid progress made in the perovskite solar cell research field. This review aims to give an overview of the achievements made in this timeframe toward the goal of developing high‐efficiency perovskite/silicon tandem cells with sufficiently large area and long lifetime to be commercially interesting. The developments that led to the recent progress in tandem cell efficiency, as well as the factors currently still limiting their performance, including parasitic absorption, reflection losses, and the nonideal perovskite absorber layer bandgap, are discussed. Based on this discussion, guidelines for future developments are given. In addition, crucial aspects to enable the commercialization of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells are reviewed, such as device stability and upscaling. Finally, economic considerations show how the number of steps and/or the costs associated to these steps for realizing the perovskite cell must be kept to a minimum to keep up with progress in the field of silicon photovoltaics.

Toward scalable perovskite‐based multijunction solar modules

“…Moreover, remarkable electronic properties coupled with simple, inexpensive fabrication make perovskite solar cells ideal candidates for low‐cost, high‐efficient multijunction photovoltaics . Multijunction solar cells such as perovskite‐Si and perovskite‐CIGS hold the exciting potential to surpass the theoretical efficiency limits of commercial single‐junction solar cells …”

Efficient Semitransparent Perovskite Solar Cells Using a Transparent Silver Electrode and Four-Terminal Perovskite/Silicon Tandem Device Exploration

“…Simultaneously, the Si solar cells have dominated the photovoltaic markets for a long time, and the PCE record of the single-junction Si solar cell has reached 26.6% [8], but the relatively high manufactur-ing cost limits their wider applications. In recent years, the perovskite/Si tandem solar cells [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] have attracted increasing interest as they possess great commercial possibility in fabricating high-performance solar cells via the cost-effective pathway.…”

“…In the twoterminal architecture, the top solar cell is processed directly on the bottom solar cell. Since the top and bottom cells are electrically connected in series, it follows that current generation within both the top and bottom cells must be equal-a constraint known as current matching [9]. The first twoterminal perovskite/Si tandem cell appeared in 2015 and obtained a relatively low PCE of 13.7% due to the current mismatch issue and parasitic absorption [11].…”

“…For final assembly, both solar cells are simply mechanically stacked [17]. Since the four-terminal architecture requires at least three transparent electrodes, minimizing the parasitic absorption and manufacturing cost for these electrodes is therefore crucial for the viability of this tandem configuration [9]. For the four-terminal perovskite/ Si devices assembled by a perovskite top cell and Si bottom cell, many efforts were dedicated to search for an appropriate transparent electrode to replace the opaque metal rear contact normally used in PSCs.…”

Highly Efficient and Stable Semi‐Transparent p‐i‐n Planar Perovskite Solar Cells by Atmospheric Pressure Spatial Atomic Layer Deposited ZnO

“…In the last few years organo lead halide perovskite solar cells (PSC) have attracted the interest in the PV community due to the rapid increase in power conversion efficiency, now close to other thin film PV technologies on small area, the low thermal budget and low cost fabrication processes . In addition, the wide and tunable band gap of the multi‐cation and/or mixed halide perovskite absorber enables the use of the perovskite device as a top cell candidate for hybrid tandem architectures in combination with silicon or copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells . Several groups have already demonstrated very promising results in this respect.…”