Swedish green builder Skanska will begin installing perovskite solar cells on office buildings under an exclusive commercial licencing agreement with Warsaw, Poland-based Saule Technologies.
Perovskites are a class of compounds similar to calcium titanite, and their light-harvesting capabilities have been a big source of buzz about the future of solar-electric cells. Solar Builder calls perovskites “the most tantalizing research category in the solar industry because of their efficiency and versatility,” but notes that the cells “thus far haven’t budged out of the laboratory setting”.
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That assessment may be about to shift, though, with Skanska set to begin implementation tests in Poland this year. “Saule Technologies has been working on the application of ink-jet printing for making free-form perovskite solar modules since 2014,” Renewable Energy World reports. In November, at a technology trade show in California, “the company presented a flexible, printed, perovskite photovoltaic module the size of an A4 sheet for the first time.”
Saule is now developing a larger, prototype assembly line.
Company co-founder Olga Malinkiewicz called the California demo “among our most important milestones for 2017”, adding that “scaling up the size of perovskite solar cells is one of the biggest challenges for companies and researchers working with this technology.”
