Solar panels have traditionally been made with silicon, over which China has had majority market control. Eager to limit China’s stranglehold over the solar market, countries have been searching for a different way to harness the sun. Now, Japanese engineers “believe they have found one in a type of solar cell that looks and feels like camera film,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The new cell uses perovskite, a crystalline structure formed by minerals that convert sunlight into electricity. The perovskite cell was invented by Japanese scientist and Toin University of Yokohama professor Tsutomu Miyasaka. Iodine is the key element used to manufacture the solar film, of which Japan is the world’s second largest producer.
Note that they are not that new: They exist since 2009 and have been a long time competing tech but they recently are becoming more efficient.
Worthi noticing that the only reason for that is not geological reserves but the fact that free market applied to minerals makes the country with the lowest wage, workers right, and ecological regulation the one with the most competitive offer.
Not having mines locally is a political choice.
Make perovskite a profitable mineral to sell in huge volume, China will become the main producer if we do not break that logic.
EDIT: But sorry for the negative tone, it is indeed good news that solar has many techs supporting its growth. Redundancy and alternatives means resilience, we can’t be against that!
There has also been a lot of traffic in illegally mined sand. Most of it is for concrete, but some ends up in electronics and solar panels:
China is responsible for a large part of illegal sand mining, because they’re completely willing to steal from anybody to get what they want. They’re a global supplier of silicon because they’re thieves.
12ft.io/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sand-mafias-are-plundering-the-earth/
Thanks for the information and no apology necesssary. All good points and important to note. The publication is pretty centrist leaning and the article is more “business” minded than I prefer but seeing information about solar technology in such a mainstream article seems significant.
Perovskite they use in solar cells can be man made. And isn’t necessarily CaTiO3, the name also applies to compounds that have the same crystal structure as CaTiO3. So basically any country can make their own supply and there is no need to mine for it.
Here is an interesting video about the synthesis of perovskite
https://youtu.be/Fft4UT7kGxg
It’s an interesting video, but how does this “there is no need to mine for it” work? The base material is coming from thin air or from some waste materials? Also the video talks a lot about the higher efficiency of tandem cells, but these tandem cells still use silicon, which still needs to be mined.
Yeah, when I read the bit on silicon I was confused for a moment. It’s extracted from sand, it’s not terribly difficult to find.