After more than five decades helping transform solar power from a niche technology into one of the world’s cheapest sources of electricity, UNSW’s Professor Martin Green is now focused on the next frontier.
The technology Professor Green has developed underpins roughly 90 per cent of the world’s solar panels today.
However, with silicon cells approaching their theoretical efficiency ceiling, attention has shifted to what comes next, and whether that next generation can survive beyond the laboratory.
Out on a patch of land near Sydney’s northern beaches, new solar panels are being exposed to salt air, heat, humidity and rain at UNSW’s Water Research Laboratory in Manly Vale.
The field-testing facility, which Professor Green is establishing alongside former student Dr Jessica Jiang, can accommodate up to 160 modules and is designed to test perovskite solar technology under real-world conditions.
Perovskites are crystalline materials that can be layered on top of silicon cells to capture more sunlight and push efficiency further.
In the latest international solar cell efficiency tables, published last week in the journal Joule, a large-area silicon cell reached 28.1 per cent efficiency while a small perovskite cell reached 28 per cent, marking the first time the best single-junction perovskite result has effectively matched the best silicon result.
A perovskite-on-silicon tandem cell recorded 35.2 per cent efficiency.
In energy terms, those numbers matter enormously since higher efficiency means more electricity from the same rooftop space, less land required for utility-scale solar farms, and lower installation and infrastructure costs across entire energy systems.
The challenge is durability, with silicon modules being routinely sold with warranties of 25 to 40 years.
Perovskite modules offer similar promises, but the technology has not yet proven it can survive for decades outside controlled conditions.
The Manly Vale facility aims to identify failure patterns across products from multiple manufacturers, many of them connected to Professor Green through his former students now leading China’s rapidly expanding solar industry.
The stakes extend well beyond laboratory benchmarks, with solar already supplying a substantial share of Australia’s electricity, Professor Green believes the contribution is doubling every few years.
He expects solar to become the dominant source of Australian electricity by around 2032, a projection he acknowledges may still prove conservative.
The energy transition that began with oil shocks in the 1970s, and which Professor Green has shaped from its early days, is not finished.
It is entering a new phase, and the question of whether perovskites can make the same leap silicon once did will help determine how far and how fast it goes.
