Perovskite solar research moves from lab records to money and manufacturing

Perovskite solar cells spent years as a lab curiosity with a stability problem. This week the money and the manufacturing talk arrived at the same time. On 2 November, the imec spin-off Noak said it had raised €5 million to scale perovskite-silicon tandem technology, according to pv magazine Global.

The round is small by energy standards. The signal is not.

Noak is a spin-off from imec, the Belgian research institute. It is working on tandem cells that stack a perovskite layer on top of silicon. That architecture is the main commercial bet for the technology. Silicon alone is nearing its practical efficiency limit. A perovskite top layer can absorb the blue end of the spectrum that silicon wastes. The funding is meant to move the work from lab-scale devices to something closer to production. pv magazine Global reported the €5 million figure on 2 November. Electronics Weekly and New Electronics carried the same round on 3 November, and Mercomindia put the amount at $5.6 million, a currency conversion of the same euro figure.

What the lab results actually say

The research base behind those commercial hopes is still moving. In the past week, journals and preprint servers have carried work on defect passivation, tin-based perovskites and tandem stability. Recent headlines point to several strands: zwitterions as more than defect passivators, a tin perovskite cell reaching 10.76% after a model-guided redesign, and a lithium-removal process that extends cell lifespan.

None of those results is a product. But they map onto the two problems that decide whether perovskite ever ships at scale: efficiency and degradation. A cell that hits a record and dies in months is a paper, not a panel.

On the stability side, recent headlines include flexible cells retaining 92.5% of efficiency after 1,044 hours of heat and humidity testing. Other cells endured 1,000 hours of extreme heat while retaining 95% efficiency. Those are lab stress tests, not field data, and the conditions matter as much as the number. Still, a thousand hours is a different conversation from the few hundred that worried researchers a few years ago.

On efficiency, the headlines include a molecule that glows in clusters pushing cell efficiency past 26%. They also include a computer-designed molecule family, P3CPenT, pointing to better perovskite materials. A simulated lead-free bilayer cell reached 28.5% on paper; a Groningen-led study put a tin-lead perovskite cell at 25.86%. Simulated and measured results sit in the same conversation, which is a problem for anyone reading quickly. The measured ones are the ones that count.

Why tandem is the commercial route

The case for perovskite-silicon tandems is straightforward. Silicon cells are approaching their theoretical ceiling, and the industry already has gigawatt-scale silicon manufacturing. A perovskite layer added on top can raise output from the same wafer area without replacing the whole line. That is why Noak's tandem focus matters more than another single-junction record: it fits the factories that exist.

The obstacles are equally concrete. Perovskite layers are sensitive to moisture, heat and voltage stress. Tandems add a complication: the top cell must survive the same decades-long outdoor life as the silicon beneath it. Scaling from a square centimetre to a full module changes the physics of uniformity and defect density. The €5 million Noak raised is early-stage money against those problems, not a solution to them.

Independent work is attacking the same issues from different angles. A robot platform combining AI and rapid imaging to improve perovskite fabrication, reported by Tech Xplore on 2 November, targets the reproducibility problem. Human hands make inconsistent films, machines less so. Asia Research News covered the same robotics and AI angle on the same day. A salt-assisted crystal growth method, reported by Nanowerk on 30 October, targets film quality at the crystal level. An acid-free molten salt method that recovers 94% of silver from solar cells, covered by pv magazine Australia on 28 October, is about end-of-life. That matters if perovskites are to be sold as a clean technology rather than a new waste stream.

The money is not only in Europe

Perovskite research is not confined to one continent. Recent headlines include Hanyang University work on perovskite cells for space, underwater and other extreme environments, reported in June. They also mention a 4 GW commercialisation partnership in market research. Those are older items and should be treated as background. But they show the range of applications being explored: rooftops, satellites, and places where conventional panels struggle.

Space is a recurring theme. Flexell Space, a Korean company, is developing solar cells based on CIGS and perovskites. It has signed an agreement with Singapore's Satoro for two in-orbit demonstration missions, one in 2027 and one in 2028, each launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9, SpaceNews reported on 28 October. The company previously ran two demonstration missions on Korea's KSLV-II, in November 2025 and October 2026. Space solar is a small market next to rooftops, but it is a useful test bed. If a perovskite cell survives launch and radiation, that says something about robustness.

The terrestrial market is where the scale is. Germany's latest rooftop solar tender awarded 288 MW across 143 projects at a volume-weighted average price of €0.0967/kWh, the Bundesnetzagentur said on 3 November, as reported by pv magazine Global. That price is just below the €0.10/kWh ceiling. It is the benchmark any new cell technology has to beat. A tandem cell that costs more per watt than the market price will not sell, however good its efficiency.

What would count as progress

The gap between a lab record and a factory line is measured in years and in failure modes. For perovskites, the questions are clear. Does the cell survive damp heat and cycling? Does the module keep its efficiency when scaled up? Can the manufacturing process be controlled tightly enough to avoid defects? The recent research items address pieces of those questions, but separately. No single paper answers all three.

Noak's funding is a bet that the tandem route can be de-risked fast enough to attract the next round. The company has not disclosed a production timeline, and the pv magazine Global report does not give one. That absence is worth noting: a €5 million round is a start, not a schedule.

The broader context is a solar industry under price pressure. Trina Solar reported a net loss of CNY 1.94 billion ($285 million) for the first nine months of 2026 on revenue of CNY 47.98 billion. It is negotiating the sale of a 51% to 70% stake in its tracker business to Shenzhen Nanshan Power, according to an announcement reported by pv magazine Global on 3 November. When the incumbents are losing money, the bar for a new cell technology rises. Perovskite has to be cheaper or better, and preferably both.

There is also a policy backdrop. In the United States, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, shortened the timeline for wind and solar projects to claim the investment tax credit and production tax credit. Projects need to be placed in service by the end of 2027 in most cases, according to a Canary Media forum report published on 3 November. Tax credit uncertainty affects the demand side, not the lab, but it shapes which technologies get funded.

For now, the perovskite story is one of incremental steps: a funding round here, a stability result there, a manufacturing method published in a journal. The step that matters most, a tandem module that survives outdoors for decades at a competitive price, has not been announced. Until it is, the records and the rounds are promises, and the industry has heard promises before.