Raising the one-sun conversion efficiency of III–V/Si solar cells to 32.8% for two junctions and 35.9% for three junctions

By S. Essig, C. Allebé, Timothy Remo, J. Geisz, M. Steiner, K. Horowitz, L. Barraud, J. Ward, M. Schnabel, A. Descoeudres and 5 more. Nature Energy, 2017

491 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Today’s dominant photovoltaic technologies rely on single-junction devices, which are approaching their practical efficiency limit of 25–27%. Therefore, researchers are increasingly turning to multi-junction devices, which consist of two or more stacked subcells, each absorbing a different part of the solar spectrum. Here, we show that dual-junction III–V//Sidevices with mechanically stacked, independently operated III–V and Si cells reach cumulative one-sun efficiencies up to 32.8%. Efficiencies up to 35.9% were achieved when combining a GaInP/GaAs dual-junction cell with a Si single-junction cell. These efficiencies exceed both the theoretical 29.4% efficiency limit of conventional Si technology and the efficiency of the record III–V dual-junction device (32.6%), highlighting the potential of Si-based multi-junction solar cells. However, techno-economic analysis reveals an order-of-magnitude disparity between the costs for III–V//Si tandem cells and conventional Si solar cells, which can be reduced if research advances in low-cost III–V growth techniques and new substrate materials are successful. To improve the efficiency of photovoltaic devices while keeping the same spatial footprint, solar cells can be stacked on top of each other. Here, Essig et al. fabricate very efficient dual-junction and triple-junction solar cells by placing one or two III–V solar cells on top of a silicon solar cell.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ecbaf89fc0c20e631be3e74045f724aad54d310

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Citations in the corpus

A Techno-Economic Analysis and Cost Reduction Roadmap for III-V Solar Cells (2018, background): “Bottom-up cost modeling and road-mapping for III-Vs on Si tandem devices was published more recently (Essig et al. 2017).”
Solar cell efficiency tables (Version 58) (2021, unknown): “2 NREL (12/16) NREL/CSEM/ EPFL, 4-term.(43) Perovskite/Si (2-terminal) 29.”
Solar cell efficiency tables (version 52) (2018, unknown): “2 NREL (12/16) NREL/CSEM/EPFL, 4‐term.(39) Perovskite/Si (monolithic) 25.”
A review of recent progress in heterogeneous silicon tandem solar cells (2018, background): “9% 3J GaInP/ GaAs//Si III–V//Si solar cells reported in [3, 50].”