> “Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”

It’s so easy to forget this and the massive scale and its relevance at the massive scale of the systems we need to (and are, to some extent) roll out. It also seems promising when these breakthroughs are happening in R&D groups of industry players trying to dogfood it rather than in labs.

At the same time though, it’s starting to feel to me, to some extent, like we have kind of solved solar? It’s everything else around it that needs to advance, particularly grid infra, batteries and electrifying the general class of difficult-to-electrify problems (steel, concrete, freight). I might be totally off-base and blinkered with that assessment.

Edit: I guess I should try to clarify my feeling after reading some of the responses below: it feels like solar tech is not really the limiting factor in renewable scaling, and that advances in solar efficiencies won’t drastically/meaningfully simplify the other challenges/limiting factors we currently face (grid infra/batteries, electrification of mfg, duck curve, etc). Children point out that space and cost savings from efficiency gains in solar may still be significant at grid scale though! Still, this is very cool progress to read about!

The super efficient ones are the panels they send to space. This is just like with chips, all about yields and price/performance.

I would not hold your breath for the typical consumer panel to improve much beyond 20%-25% any time soon sadly.

It does generate a lot of hopeful breathless articles which rubs me the wrong way. It is important to stay realistic in the search for solutions.

Solar is already great and cheap and there are lot more wins possible in the actual deployment as most of the cost is now overheads, bureaucracy, labour, 'etc.

Perovskite cells have not been demonstrated to last nearly as long as silicon cells. If you trade cheaper, conversion efficient cells, but they last 1/5 the age, the system cost is much higher because you'll have to re-pay for replacement / reinstallation costs much more frequently.

Isn’t installation costs like frames, transportation and labor makes it irrelevant now?

Listening to some of the processes described for eking out that extra 1-2% efficiency, I'm curious if there's a crossover point where the energy required to get that last couple theoretical percentage points exceeds the lifetime return from the efficiency gain to the panel.

I can tell you I am excited... but when can we realistically afford solar panels with high efficiency?

If a person came by my house and said, "Yo, I can do an installation!". Those panels are like running on a 10 year old or greater design and process.

Is there a known theoretical maximum efficiency for solar cells that we can’t get past with our current approach?

If they’re hitting 25% are we close to that limit?

Hell yeah. Big win for the engineers here. Nobody builds better solar panels than us.

TLDR they're at 25.5 percent. Didn't read but it seemed like it's probably a practical incremental improvement which is good.

The PhD here talks about 1% gains, meanwhile some random website, windows process or chrome itself takes a lot of power - and it seems nobody cares. Yet it adds up too. Not only via ecology, also often poor customer experience.