GCL has officially begun production at its 1 GW perovskite factory in Kunshan, China, which has a planned total scale of 2 GW and $700 million investment cost.
Perovskite, as we have covered in many prior articles and forecasts, has the potential to revolutionize every segment of the solar industry, from satellites to indoor devices to the mainline utility-scale and rooftop segments, whether by cramming more power per square meter using a silicon tandem, or by providing flexible, lightweight, transparent solar panels with cells one micron thick.
This factory commissioning in Kunshan could be the big moment for perovskite photovoltaics, in which a major manufacturer commissions a full-size solar cell and module factory using the technology, then produces and sells hundreds of MW for projects representing an investment scale of hundreds of millions of dollars. We wrote about China’s other perovskite factories here.
This has been a long time coming – this factory was first proposed in 2019, when GCL (one of the top perovskite companies alongside Oxford PV, Microquanta, and Utmolight) announced it had reached 16% efficiency on a wide-area module. A 100 MW line was built in 2021, and construction of the 1 GW facility began in late 2023. That 16% efficiency has become 19%, more importantly with larger size and lifespan as well, and the company also has achieved a silicon-perovskite tandem efficiency of 29.5%.
But we’ve already seen many “100 MW” factories commissioned around the world, only to lie fallow producing small test batches, for almost two years now. There’s about a dozen perovskite solar projects around the world, but they are kW or 1-MW scale only.
Either perovskite has spent the past two years not crossing the finish line because it still lifespan/durability problems, or the perovskite companies have solved them, but cannot persuade investors that they have done so – it hardly matters which. There’s also the issue that mainstream silicon is cheaper and more efficient than ever.
This GCL factory activation is the biggest perovskite news since the Trina Solar – Oxford PV technology licensing deal, which we covered here. It’s possible that deal indicates that Trina Solar, one of the biggest conventional solar manufacturers, is preparing a full-scale perovskite investment. But it’s equally possible that Trina is drawing little profit from silicon PV, and wants the license to make money off the many perovskite startups springing up in China, regardless of whether the sector takes off any times soon or not.
Something very strange about China’s perovskite sector is that many companies, like Utmolight, Microquanta and possibly also this GCL factory at Kunshan, is that they are neither tandem, nor are they light-weight thin-film. Instead they are single-junction perovskite encapsulated not in polymer to allow them to be lightweight thin-film, but rather in traditional solar glass and metal mounting – making them just as heavy as silicon solar panels, but with lower lifespan, lower power output, and (at least while scaling up) higher production cost. We attempted to explain this by pointing to Microquanta’s claimed superior performance in low-light conditions, such as dawn and dusk and under cloud cover, but maybe the real explanation is that the industry is not “real” yet, and is still in the stage of raising publicity to raise speculative investment to fund further R&D efforts.
Similarly, the now considerable scale of investment and interest which perovskite has now attracted may speak less to it becoming viable imminently, and may instead reflect silicon technology reaching a peak beyond which very little further progress is possible. As the Shockley-Queisser limit of efficiency is approached for silicon PV, further improvements become smaller and harder to achieve, while further cost reductions are difficult below $100 per kW, with more and more of the price of a solar panel owed to essentially immutable factors such as several millimeters of solar-grade glass.
The solar industry has changed very rapidly for its whole existence up to this point. In recent years the price of solar power has halved and the manufacturing and installation of solar panels has grown five times over, while the average efficiency grew by 0.5% a year from, say, 21% – meaning 210 Watts per square meter under 1 sun illumination.
This too may change now, with the solar industry stagnating in an admittedly pleasant state of a mammoth 600 GW/year, using $100/kW solar panels with 30-year lifespans. The remaining innovations relate to shaving a few more dollars of cost off by optimizing silver paste usage, or painstakingly adopting the slightly higher performing, slightly more expensive heterojunction and Back-Contact technologies.
Only perovskite has potential to shake the solar industry up, but the evidence still isn’t here yet one way or another.
At least if GCL’s 1 GW perovskite factory doesn’t sell anything like 1 GW of products onto the mainstream solar market segments, there’s the likelihood that companies like Halocell can make money more modestly.
Halocell has just this week launched a perovskite solar module for low-light conditions, ideal for use in homes, offices, and industrial buildings – to power low-power equipment using indoor light, where perovskite massively outperforms silicon PV. It calls this the Ambient Module.