Enabling a renewable future with terawatts of solar and the role of next-generation solar energy materials – perovskites for the future?

Deeply transforming the energy system by increased use of solar and other renewable technologies while becoming both sustainable and reliable is a major challenge that surpasses simple drivers such as cost and other incentives. The solar energy market has been growing at astonishing year-to-year rates of over 20% per year surpassing all previous estimates but is still only a minor component of the total energy use of the world. Furthermore, it is unclear whether further growth can be sustained by current technologies owing to large capital expenditures (CapEx) needed for new plants leading to a possibility of production peaking before we reach significant solar production. To enable a terawatt revolution, not just traditional technologies are needed in much larger amounts than current production levels but also a mix of new, high-efficiency, scalable technologies needs to be developed. One promising new technology could upend this and offer strongly reduced cost and low CapEx production using solution processing with roll-to-roll techniques and low-cost rapid vapor phase deposition. However, many barriers remain such as questions about the material’s reliability, ultimate efficiency and its scalability. Also, these novel materials turn out to be poorly understood from a basic chemistry and physics perspective. This presentation discusses the current research at NREL and other institutes towards driving the technology rapidly towards commercialization both from an applied materials and fundamental device and materials physics perspective and goes further into the technology barriers that need to be dealt with before such a revolution can happen.
Secondly, if indeed we enable a terawatt revolution in photovoltaics, large changes are needed to the world’s energy systems. Even at the fairly low current penetration levels of solar, it is already leading to situations where solar energy has to be curtailed because the sun doesn’t always shine when you need it to. It is clear that strategies are needed to deal with this problem that involve storage either using electrochemical batteries or by producing fuels from sunlight or other strategies. In 2014, the US produced 125 TWh (or 0.4 % of its total energy use) by solar. In contrast, 2.1 quads of the energy use went into production of hydrogen from steam methane reforming. Hydrogen can be used not just to run cars but can be used to produce liquid fuels, fertilizer, and is a major industrial chemical. Producing hydrogen from renewable resources such as solar could potentially transform the entire energy economy and decrease the enormous amount of energy that is currently wasted or rejected when renewable resources produce more than is needed by the grid. There are significant technical and fundamental science barriers towards reaching this goal and this talk will briefly discuss what basic and applied research is needed to reach this goal and compare to other approaches towards a carbon-free future.
 

1. Berry, J. J., van de Lagemaat, J., Al-Jassim, M. M., Kurtz, S., Yan, Y., & Zhu, K. (2017). Perovskite Photovoltaics: The Path to a Printable Terawatt-Scale Technology. ACS Energy Letters, 2540–2544. http://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00964