Swift Solar Takes $27M for the Sanctity of Solar Efficiency…

Generating clean electricity using photovoltaic technology is the clean energy transition success story to date, but entrepreneurs and investors continue to use science to improve efficiency and costs.

Startup Swift Solar raised $27 millions of dollars in a Series A round this week aimed at commercializing a new class of light-absorbing crystalline materials known as perovskites that could improve on today’s wholly dominant technology, crystalline silicon.

This is not the first company to have such an idea. Over the past decade, billions of dollars in venture and corporate funding have been spent toward the goal of producing high-efficiency, non-silicon solar modules using materials including perovskites. America’s First Solar is the world’s only non-silicon solar power producer to survive and achieve multi-gigawatt capacity. (Incidentally, First Solar, which uses technology based on thin-film cadmium telluride materials, acquired a perovskite startup last year.)

In recent years 10 years, the average efficiency of standard silicon solar modules – the percentage of solar energy converted into useful energy – has been steadily increasing from approximately 15 percent to more than 20 percent. Solar energy efficiency is forecast to plateau 23 Down 24 percent by the end of this decade. This is an inspiring technological advance, but now challenges the physical limitations of these materials.

Instead of fighting companies – most of them based in China – that are squeezing every drop of performance out of silicon modules and producing them at astonishing scale and low cost, Swift and many other companies want to break through the performance limitations of standard perovskite modules. To this end, these companies strive to create ​““tandem cell,” stacking perovskite on a conventional silicon cell.

Joel Jean, Swift CEO and co-founder, as well as Scott Graybeal, CEO startup Caelux told Canary Media that the perovskite layer could increase relative efficiency enough to make modules 27 Down 29 percentage efficiency. More efficient solar panels mean more electricity can be produced from the same acre of land or rooftop, making solar power – already the cheapest form of electricity in history – even cheaper.

Perovskites also hold promise because they can be made from earth-rich materials and can be recycled, and perovskite cells can be made using printing processes that are cheaper and at lower temperatures than the complex equipment required to produce silicon modules.

However, questions remain about the durability and stability of perovskite modules. It will take years of investment, implementation and industry standardization to properly characterize the long-term reliability of a perovskite module to the satisfaction of risk-averse insurers and project developers. In contrast, silicon is one of the most studied elements on Earth; its long-term behavior and failure modes are already well understood to the point that it allows module manufacturers to offer thirty-one-year warranty for its products.