Photovoltaics hold the promise to solve the climate crisis, due to their eco-friendly character, as one of the renewable technologies with the lowest carbon footprint. However, the current prices and the low manufacturing throughput of Silicon solar panels (the dominant technology of the PV market) holds their widespead development across the planet. Among the different alternative PV technologies that show great promise for commercialization replacing silicon, is perovskite PVs, due to their solution processability combined with efficiencies comparable to silicon. This makes perovskite PVs ideal candidates with a potential for high throughput low cost panel manufacturing. However, the fact that high efficiency perovskite PVs repy on gold as the current collecting electrode, this makes them less competitive towards low cost (gold is expensive raw material) and high throughput manufacturing (gold requires thermal evaporation). Thus, finding an alternative printalbe low cost material to replace gold as the current collecting electrode in perovskite PVs, without compromising their performance, will consist perovskite PV superior compared to the traditional silicon solar panels. Such an demonstration would enable the widespreade development of solar panels as the major source for the generation of electricity in commercial, utility and residential scale. Additionally, the significantly lower carbon footprint of a printable current collector (compared to the thermally evaporated gold counterparts) will have a significant impact on further reducing the carbon footprint of solar panels during their manufacturing phase. Furthermore, the development of perovskite PV, will also benefit the adoption of solar panels on other fields such such portable devices, airplanes, electric vehicles, satelites, etc. due to their significantly lower weight (i.e. higher power-per-weight output) as a thin film PV technology (which does not rely on thic wafers). To achieve the afforementioned, novel graphene-based printable electrodes/current collectors, due to their high conductivity, will be developed and tested in perovskite solar cells with the aim to achieve high performances (~20% in small area cells), high operational stabilities (comparable with silicon) and significant power-per weight outputs. As a conclusion, GNPs4PVs demontrated efficiencies up to 19.2% accompanied with thermal stabilities of >1000 hours and also demonstrated the huge potential of of graphene in perovskite solar cells for high power-per-weight solar cells and towards reducing the operational temperature of these devices.
