An affordable green energy source—Evolving through current developments of organic, dye sensitized, and perovskite solar cells

ABSTRACT

Intensive R&D efforts made in solar photovoltaic area has enabled Si, GaAs, CdTe, and CIGS devices exhibiting nearly ideal efficiencies. However, cost incurred per unit energy does not allow them to qualify for alternate energy source besides environmental issues at production floors. Consequently, search is still continuing not only to reduce cost by improved efficiency, reduced materials cost, and simplified processing resulting in a cleaner and greener technology. Current successes in organic, dye-sensitized, and perovskite solar cells with efficiencies in 10–15% range raise concrete hope for evolving a low cost and green technology involving solution processable organic/inorganic compounds extendable to roll-to-roll production. The current status and future prospects of these three promising routes are reviewed here highlighting the possibility of an emerging alternate green energy source to supplement the conventional ones at commercial level.

KEYWORDS:

• Dye sensitized solar cells
• green energy source
• organic solar cells
• perovskite solar cells
• photovoltaic energy source

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Center of Excellence in Nanotechnology (COENT), CII Western Region, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. The challenging environment, created and duly supported by Mr. Anjan Das, Mr. GK Moinudeen, and the colleagues at the COENT, was especially enjoyed by the author while studying the current development of low cost solar cells and the help received is sincerely acknowledged. In connection with preparing the present manuscript, uses of various concepts developed over past few decades for improving the fabrication technology of photovoltaic solar cells, which are elaborately discussed in various excellent review articles and especially the present status of the device-related developments reported in recent publications, are sincerely acknowledged. The references provided here may not be that exhaustive as in most review papers mentioned above, but the contributions made by numerous authors in this area are all duly acknowledged, directly or indirectly, through the references currently included in the text as well as those mentioned in the referred review articles.