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.
The work is led by Professor Sarah Kurtz, chair of UC Merced's electrical engineering department, whose team will collect and analyze data on how the panel performs over the coming months. "This is a big deal for us because it will be the first time for Tandem PV to put a panel of this size out for testing," Kurtz said.
Sean Dunfield of Tandem PV said UC Merced offered a combination of skilled researchers, community and convenient location for the project. "Everybody knows Sarah Kurtz," Dunfield said. "She collaborates with a lot of people in the industry and they all have the utmost respect for her." The California Energy Commission, which helped fund the work, prioritizes projects based in-state, and the campus site cut down on logistics: "And UC Merced is an easy trip," Dunfield added. "I drove here from the Bay Area this morning to drop it off." Previously, this kind of testing was done at UC Merced's Castle Aviation and Development Center, at a former Air Force base in Atwater.
Tandem PV has raised a $50 million Series A round to build panels at this size, and is aiming to raise a Series B later this year to fund a high-volume commercial-scale factory. Kurtz noted the difficulty of the underlying technology: "My experience with making solar cells is that you have to do a hundred or even a thousand things right or it doesn't work. Tandem PV has mastered many of the critical steps and is the leading company in the United States for this kind of technology." Dunfield framed durability, rather than peak efficiency alone, as the metric that ultimately matters: "What everybody cares about is, what is the energy output at 30 years?"
Beyond the data the installation will generate for Tandem PV, Kurtz pointed to the value for students working on the project. The UC Merced team includes graduate student Shariful Islam, who is in charge of data collection, undergraduates Josue Vera, Luke Gagne and John Kim, and other students assisting with data analysis. "This is a way for students to apply what they are learning in class in a way that is a tangible contribution to the project," Kurtz said. One student on the team, Christine Chang, turned her work on the project into an internship with Tandem PV this year. Dunfield added: "At the student level, it's really unusual to have access to this kind of project. You learn a lot in school, but here they can see the science in commercialization and tech transfer."
