Tandem

LONGi Green Energy has reportedly filed a public environmental impact assessment announcement for a new "Novel Crystalline Silicon-Perovskite Tandem Solar Cell Technology and Equipment Industrialization Project," confirming plans to invest 204 million yuan (about $28 million) in a 100 MW pilot production line for high-efficiency silicon-perovskite tandem solar cells in Xixian New Area, Shaanxi Province.

According to the announcement, the project is classified as a modification and will occupy roughly 4,000 square meters within the existing plant of LONGi's previously registered Phase I Pilot Project at its Central Research Institute. Rather than building new facilities from scratch, LONGi will use the leased factory space and supporting infrastructure already in place, installing key equipment such as perovskite thin-film deposition systems, perovskite rapid crystallization tools and functional-layer thin-film deposition equipment to support R&D and pilot-scale testing of the tandem cells.

GCL Optoelectronic Material (Kunshan GCL Optoelectronic Materials), a subsidiary of GCL Group, has completed a D1 financing round exceeding 100 million yuan (over US$14 million), led by Jinxin Capital, with Sequoia China, Xiang'an Venture Capital and Suzhou Asset Management participating. The company says the funds will primarily support the commercial delivery of its ground-mounted photovoltaic power stations and the verification of space photovoltaic applications.

The D1 round follows a Series C2 round completed in July 2025 that raised nearly 200 million yuan. Since its first angel round in May 2020, GCL Optoelectronics has attracted strategic investments exceeding one billion yuan from companies and institutions including CATL, TCL Group, Tencent, Temasek and Sequoia Capital.

Researchers connected to Chinese flexible-perovskite maker SunFlex have published two separate papers within the same month, addressing two of the field's persistent stability problems: halide segregation in wide-bandgap perovskite/organic tandems, and desorption of the self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) used at the perovskite/electrode interface.

The first paper, from researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai Jiao Tong University - including SunFlex co-founder and CAS academician Yongfang Li - tackles a known weakness of wide-bandgap, high-bromide mixed-halide perovskites, which are used as the front cell in perovskite/organic tandem solar cells: they tend to mix unevenly during crystallization and undergo light-induced halide segregation during operation, both of which limit device performance. The team introduced a photo-transformable additive, 4-[3-(trifluoromethyl)-3H-diazirin-3-yl]benzylamine (TDB), into the perovskite precursor solution to address both problems in sequence. During crystallization, TDB suppresses the rapid precipitation of the bromide-rich phase and speeds up halide mixing during annealing, improving initial homogeneity. Then, once the device is under illumination, TDB itself transforms into a new chemical species that adsorbs more strongly onto the perovskite's grain-boundary surfaces, blocking the formation of iodide-related defects and suppressing both defect-assisted carrier trapping and ion migration - the mechanisms behind light-induced halide segregation.

Researchers from Tianjin University, Tianjin Institute of Power Sources, Beijing Institute of Technology, the Shanghai Institute of Micro-System and Information Technology (Chinese Academy of Sciences), the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and Harbin Institute of Technology have developed a perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell for space applications that reached a certified 27.49% power conversion efficiency (PCE) under AM0 (zero air mass) illumination - which the team describes as the highest certified AM0 efficiency reported to date for this type of tandem - while also demonstrating strong resistance to electron and proton radiation and stable output during a real high-altitude balloon flight to nearly 30 km.

Perovskite/silicon tandems are attractive for space power because they combine perovskite's radiation tolerance with silicon's mature manufacturing and near-infrared response, but most previous work has focused on efficiency under standard terrestrial (AM1.5G) conditions rather than the radiation resilience and extreme thermal cycling that low Earth orbit (LEO) actually demands. In LEO, devices cycle between roughly +90°C and -90°C more than 15 times a day and face continuous bombardment by high-energy electrons and protons, which damage semiconductors through ionization and atomic displacement. In a monolithic, series-connected tandem, damage to either subcell drags down the whole device - and the researchers found that the silicon bottom cell is usually the weak link.

TNO, together with Dutch industrial partners Levitech, Tempress, Yparex and SMIT Thermal Solutions and the German R&D center of Hanwha Q Cells, has demonstrated for the first time that bifacial tandem solar technology can be manufactured at industrial scale, delivering measurably higher electricity output from the same surface area under real operating conditions.

The module architecture stacks monolithic perovskite/silicon solar cells to reach higher efficiencies than current silicon-only modules, while its bifacial design captures light from both the front and rear of the panel for additional yield. The work was carried out under the Fit4Market project, a Dutch-German collaboration TNO has coordinated since 2023, which set out to combine bifacial light capture with tandem cell architecture using processes compatible with existing photovoltaic production lines - prioritizing scalability and real-world validation over maximizing laboratory efficiency.

Xingshu Plan (星枢计划) is a Shanghai-based space computing program led by Fudan University, which supplies the underlying space-based large-model technology, together with Xingshu Tiansuan Aerospace Technology, which leads the program's research, development and operations. The program aims to build a distributed network of computing satellites that provide on-demand computing services to sectors including energy, maritime and government.

During the recent World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, the program unveiled its first "constellation" - a group of three linked satellites, launched together to work as a single coordinated unit. The group uses a "one main, two auxiliary" architecture: a central computing satellite, a "Fuxi" weather satellite carrying a microwave radiometer for all-weather atmospheric sensing, and an ultra-low-orbit remote-sensing satellite with its own onboard edge-computing capability. The three satellites are linked by inter-satellite laser communication, and the group is designed so that data collection, AI inference and analysis are all completed in orbit, without needing to downlink raw data to the ground. It's the central computing satellite in this first group that uses perovskite tandem solar cells to provide its power.

TandemPV has installed one of its perovskite-silicon tandem panels atop UC Merced's Science and Engineering 2 Building for outdoor testing, installed alongside smaller Tandem PV test panels already in place, marking the start of a multi-month durability study run with UC Merced researchers.

The panel is built on Tandem PV's approach of integrating a perovskite layer into existing silicon solar manufacturing supply chains. A coating just one-hundredth the thickness of a human hair is meant to boost the panel's energy output from 24% to 30%, which the company says translates to about 30% more electricity from the same footprint compared with a typical silicon panel. Because labor and balance-of-system costs account for roughly 75% of utility-scale solar costs, generating more power per panel without a larger footprint helps bring down the overall cost of a solar installation.

Researchers from Nanjing University, JA Solar, Chongqing University, Jiangsu New Energy Development Co. and Jiangsu Guoxin Research Institute have designed a new self-assembled monolayer (SAM) additive molecule that fixes a longstanding defect problem at the buried hole-transport interface of inverted perovskite solar cells, enabling a wide-bandgap perovskite cell with a champion power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 23.7% and a perovskite/silicon tandem device that reaches 33.3% (certified at 33.1%), with no measurable PCE loss after 30 days of outdoor operation.

Device configuration illustration and chemical structures of Me and TTA. Image from: Science Advances

In inverted perovskite solar cells, the SAM sitting beneath the perovskite layer governs how well the perovskite crystallizes and how efficiently charge is extracted at that buried interface. The carbazole-based SAM molecule Me-4PACz is widely used for its strong hole-extraction properties, but it tends to self-aggregate when processed from alcoholic solvents, producing uneven coverage with island-like clusters and pinholes. That patchy coverage weakens binding to both the substrate below and the perovskite above, raises interface defect density, and impairs charge transport - a problem that has proven difficult to solve without sacrificing some other aspect of performance.

Researchers from Tsinghua University and Civil Aviation University of China have developed a perovskite laser cell-thermoelectric (PLC-TE) tandem device that converts an incoming green laser beam into electricity at a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 38.49%, designed to be embedded in the wing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as an in-flight power source.

The work targets laser wireless power transmission (LWPT), an approach to beaming energy over long distances that offers strong directionality, flexible beam-steering and resistance to electromagnetic interference. For UAVs, whose flight time is fundamentally capped by onboard battery capacity, LWPT raises the possibility of a drone that recharges continuously in the air rather than returning to the ground. CsPbBr₃ perovskite is a strong candidate receiver material for this application: its broad bandgap absorbs efficiently across the blue-green range (400-550 nm) that aligns with atmospheric transmission windows, and the material remains stable under the high-temperature, high-energy-photon conditions a concentrated laser beam produces.

Researchers from Soochow University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Suzhou Maxwell Technologies, the University of Oxford, Wuxi EliTe Solar, Hangzhou Zhongneng Photoelectricity Technology, Shenzhen Polytechnic University and Suzhou National Laboratory have developed an indium-free recombination layer for monolithic perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells, based on titanium oxynitride (TiOxNy), reporting power conversion efficiencies of 33.3% on 1.0 cm² devices and 30.6% on industrial-size, 207.87 cm² tandems.

Monolithic perovskite/silicon tandems are widely seen as a route past the efficiency ceiling of single-junction photovoltaics, but turning lab-scale records into durable, manufacturable modules depends heavily on one thin layer: the recombination interconnect that joins the two subcells. That layer has to do three things at once - support fast charge recombination, stay optically transparent so light reaches both subcells, and form a chemically robust interface that holds up over time. Today's leading options each fall short somewhere: indium-containing transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) raise cost and supply concerns, while silicon-based tunnel junctions introduce parasitic optical losses.