The solar cell of the future will be flexible, highly efficient and oh-so cheap – just as long as we can make it work in the rain
GOOD things come to those who wait, and Tsutomu Miyasaka had waited a long time. Knowing that a solar cell can be made using just about any pigment – coffee, chlorophyll, red wine – the Japanese physicist had spent years testing all sorts of colourful substances in the hope of finding one as efficient as it was cheap. Then, one day in April 2007, a student walked into his lab at the University of Tokyo, carrying a lump of an unremarkable mineral called perovskite.
It proved to be the start of something entirely remarkable. When Miyasaka reported the results from his first perovskite solar ...
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