Australian-made commercial indoor perovskite solar cells coming soon

Australian pervoskite solar cell developer Halocell Energy is close to bringing their first indoor solar product to market setting a precedent for battery-powered electronics to undergo an energy transformation.

September 12, 2024 Ev Foley

Image: Halocell Energy

Wagga Wagga-headquartered global leader in the development and commercialisation of perovskite solar cell (PSC) technology, Halocell Energy is preparing to release the first units of it’s flexible 7-centimetre PSC strips, which it says can generate enough power to replace disposable batteries, ideal for indoor use.

The technology has application in digital price-labelling, widely adopted by the retail sector, where perovskites particularly shine for their ability to be chemically tuned to operate in diverse indoor lighting environments.

Halocell Energy Director Chief Executive Paul Moonie told pv magazine the PSC’s can be optimised for a warm LED, a cool LED, fluorescent, the sun, a cloudy climate, or space, making perovskites highly versatile.

“So, if you were to go into a Woolworths fresh produce section, you’ll notice the electronic shelf-labels aren’t paper anymore and these locations have standardised lighting,” Moonie said.

“In Australia, that’s hundreds of thousands of units so we can tune our chemistry in production to serve one product line, and the chemistry is a simple ink replacement in production so it doesn’t involve retooling the whole production line, it’s just swapping out the ink,” he said.

Halocell’s PSC strips will soon be available to buy from their website as part of a strategy to garner support for the technology and begin building a customer base in the lead up to opening a manufacturing facility in Wagga Wagga, capable of producing 70 million units per year.

“We’re currently manufacturing on the small scale and that process is pretty easy to upscale. The units that will soon become available on the website, will be much more expensive than when we’re manufacturing at scale, when costs will be a fraction than currently available indoor PV,” Moonie said.

As one of about 100 companies in the world researching the commercialisation of perovskite solar cells, and the first to focus on indoor solar, Moonie said the next steps are to crawl, walk, run.

“We’re aiming to get to that stage where the technology has a good reputation and people want to buy it at volume, but where we can also produce it in bulk,” he said.

Comparing perovskites indoor solar efficiency, Moonie said gallium indium phosphide photovoltaic cells demonstrate the highest (40%) but is prohibitively expensive ($909 per kilogram as of September 2024).

“The next most commercially viable option is amorphous silicon which is about 8% efficient and we’ve lined up our solar cell, with the same form factor against amorphous silicon and we’re 25% efficient. They’re $6 and we expect to retail for below $1 per unit,” Moonie said.

“Also, the difference in the amount of energy that goes into the manufacture of silicon versus perovskite is vast. Silicon needs about 1,300 degrees Celsius while perovskite needs 1 to 20 degrees Celsius, for a couple of minutes,” Moonie said.

“So, silicon on an Aussie rooftop gets takes about two years in energy payback, but perovskite’s a couple of months, also to do silicon in Australia, from start to finish, you need cheap energy and cheap labour.”

“Because perovskites can be flexible, and we use roll-to-roll printing, so its highly automated and rapid, so we’ve got cheap energy, cheap labour, cheap material prices and fast production, and that’s how we can compete with silicon,” Moonie said.

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