Monday morning’s plenary in Area 2 was given by Christian Kaufman from H-Z Berlin who discussed recent improvements in the fabrication and performance of CIGS/Perovskite tandems and that the optimization in the smoothness of the CIGS absorber, the interlayer recombination layers, and reduced sputter damage during ALD deposition of contacts are critical to superior device performance. This, coupled with optimization of the HTLs through the incorporation of self-assembled monolayers and optimization of bandgap of the perovskite top contact has led to increases in PCE from 21.6% to a recent record efficiency of 24.16%.
The Area 8 plenary given by William Gambogi (DuPont) described the need for (and development of) advanced protocols for accelerated lifetime testing, and better testing methodologies to assess new materials including encapsulation, glass coverage, and interconnects. Such methodologies have been developed as the input parameters for modeling of failure mechanisms and the ability to understand and predict the origin of such degradation. A particular innovation to these protocols has been the implementation of sequential testing under damp heat, UV, and water plus UV conditions, which has facilitated the testing of degradation via multiple stressors and the assessment of failure mechanisms in real and practical outdoor environments.
Monday’s keynote address given by Dr. Becca Jones-Albertus from the US Department of Energy Solar Technologies Office, discussed the role of the DoE in realizing a decarbonized power grid by 2050, which requires significant increases in the implementation of PV by 2035 (~40%), in addition to significant innovations in terms of efficiency and reductions in cost. The DoE is supporting these efforts via considerable funding within a framework that facilitates PV implementation in a more equitable manner.
In Monday’s Awards Session it was announced that Dr. Marta Victoria from Aarhus University is this year’s IEEE Stuart R. Wenham Young Professional Awardee for her work in the Modeling of large-scale energy systems. Professor Stephen R. Forrest from the University of Michigan won the 2022 Cherry Award and presented an excellent perspective on organic PV for window power generation and BIPV applications. During this presentation Professor Forrest discussed the significant recent improvements in organic PV performance (approaching 20% PCE), which has been due to considerable innovations transport layers, particularly the realization of non- fullerene acceptor layers such that photovoltaics appears the “next big thing for organics.”
In Monday afternoon’s Area 3 session Stephen Polly from RIT discussed using an epitaxially grown AlGaAs based distributed Bragg reflector to enhance the absorption and therefore performance of 2J InGaP/GaAs based devices incorporating strain balanced quantum wells. In the same session, Larkin Sayre from the University of Cambridge presented ultrathin GaAs based solar cells with very high radiation tolerance compared to thicker devices, while work from NIST (Hamadani) showed the power of hyperspectral imaging in probing defects in GaAs based devices.
Monday’s Area 5 session included discussions of new developments in optoelectronic characterization of solar cells and modules. Highlights included correlated chemical and optoelectronic mapping using synchrotron-based x-ray methods discussed by Connor Dolan from the University of California San Diego, and the implementation of deep learning methods to enable electroluminescence measurements with shorter capture times presented by Grace Liu from University of New South Wales.
An exciting session in Area 6 included several excellent presentations including a discussion of ALD grown tin oxide from the University of Grenoble Alpes, which allows for continuous deposition on silicon showing a promising future for silicon/perovskite tandem devices, and off- the-shelf active learning utilized by researchers at UC San Diego to free resources and quickly determine optimal perovskite compositions. Other highlights included presentations on the inconsistencies in the injection-dependent lifetimes of perovskite thin films (Chin – UNSW) comparing TRPL and steady state PL measurements and revealing that Shockley-Reed-Hall rate equations are best suited for lifetime fits in these systems.
Area 7 highlights included a presentation by Dr Christiana Honsberg (Arizona State University) who presented an experimental demonstration of the effectiveness of agrivoltaics for growing various crops in Arizona, which demonstrated that 50% less irrigation is necessary and increased yield relative to non-PV shaded crops. Student Annie Russell from SUNLAB in Ottawa, described results that show higher snowpacks underneath PV modules can result in an energy yield loss of ~-0.5% annually relative to ground-level albedo.
Monday afternoon’s session in Area 10 included a presentation by Ethan Ford from UNSW who discussed the impact of the 2019-2020 Australian Black Summer Wildfires on Photovoltaic Energy Production describing how the economic reductions due to wildfire smoke can be quantified using just a subset of meter data. Jing Huang from Clean Power Research described enhancing temporal variability of 5-minute satellite driven solar irradiance data and that high temporal resolution irradiance data using both high and low frequency enhancements is a more accurate approach. Vicente Lara Fanego from Solargis discussed the evaluation and uncertainty surrounding Albedo data sources and described best practices in measurements that accounted for mixed terrain and seasonal impacts.
