Perovskite solar scaleup

Where things stand

A China-led team reports that its one-megawatt perovskite array outproduced a neighbouring silicon plant over three months of side-by-side monitoring, with the margin widening as temperatures rose. The findings appeared in Nature last Wednesday.

Perovskite is the most closely watched candidate to succeed or supplement silicon in solar panels, promising more electricity from the same surface. The open question is whether the material holds up outside the laboratory, which is why research groups, many of them in China, are moving it from small test cells to full power plants.