The Causes of Degradation of Perovskite Solar Cells

J. Bisquert, E. J. Juarez-Perez, The Causes of Degradation of Perovskite Solar Cells, J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2019, 10, 5889-5891.

Last field year, of perovskite two important solar cells milestones that
would were bring reached us closer in the to imminent commercial
use of this light-harvester material. One
was the first perovskite-based building integrated photovoltaic
(BIPV) product demonstration by Saule Technologies.1
Another significant landmark was a new certified world record
for a 1 cm2 perovskite−silicon tandem solar cell achieving 28%
conversion efficiency achieved by Oxford PV,2 which surpassed
their previous certified record of 27.3% efficiency announced
earlier during 2018. The first achievement outlined above is a
technological and symbolic tied match with the emergent
antonomasy dye-sensitized solar cell technology that also
became integrated in buildings for demonstration purposes.
The next achievement is more relevant due to the excellent
integration demonstrated with mature Si-based solar cell
devices, even rather than the terrific efficiency record achieved
by the tandem device. With these two encouraging checkpoints
in mind, we start 2019 optimistic of the two harshest criticisms
for hybrid perovskite coming, in principle, from two different
fronts. First, what will be the expected stability of the devices,
and second, but no less important, how will the environmental
problem of the lead content be addressed. Would it not be
great if these two problems were solved using the same
countermeasure? Is encapsulation such a solution?