US team claims solar cell efficiency breakthrough

Research carried out at Columbia University in the US could lead to the development of solar cells with double the efficiency of conventional silicon-based technology.

The team’s work - reported in the journal Science - focused on a class of materials known as Hybrid Organic Inorganic Perovskites (HOIPs).

Silicon panels, which currently dominate the solar energy market, must have a purity of 99.999 percent to be effective and even microscopic defects can dramatically affect their performance. The reason HOIPs have caused so much excitement is that they are able to harvest energy from sunlight even when the crystals had a significant number of defects. And because they don't need to be pristine they can be produced on a large scale and at low cost.

Over the last seven years, scientists have managed to increase the efficiency of HOIPs to 22 percent from 4 percent. The best silicon cells, the product of decades of research, are able to convert around 25 percent of the sun’s energy into electrical current.