Energy Timelines Photovoltaic

There has been modest "pure scientific" progress in solar cells since 2008, when this timeline ends. The big change has been the development of perovskite-structure materials for thin film solar cells. These demonstrated remarkably high efficiency within a few years of discovery, but it has been difficult to scale up manufacturing techniques and stabilize the materials so that they can last decades in a solar farm like the incumbent cell technologies can.

The manufacturing progress since 2008 has been enormous. The world now manufactures and installs over 500 gigawatts (peak) of solar PV capacity per year; in 2008, the world installed about 8 gigawatts [1]. Costs and prices have plummeted. The laboratory champion-efficiency cells of 2008 (e.g. Sanyo's 23% efficient heterojunction cell found in NREL's table of records [2]) are now surpassed by commercial products [3] that get manufactured by the gigawatt and sold at prices low enough to compete with coal power.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

[2] https://www.nlr.gov/pv/cell-efficiency

[3] https://en.risen.com/assembly/hjt

(2008)