Three engineers leading the field in clean energy solutions come together for a special event presented by Kevin Fong at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
you can t go out today and buy perovskite solar cells, but we re building a production line at the moment. we re talking about next year, the first cells and modules will be in production and start to be deployed in the world. so this is all fantastic, this is state of the art technology and engineering that is market ready or nearly market ready. so is the message that i should get that you are going to gallop to my rescue when it comes to climate change? that i can carry on with my life as i always have, and everything is going to be fine, because the engineers are going to sort it all out? henry, i want to start with you. is that what i should be taking away from this? that is not what you should be taking away, but you should feel encouraged that there can be solutions. but we all need to. it s a challenging road ahead. there s a lot of scale that needs to happen from the industry, and we all need to embrace it, and embrace this change. the technology s there, but if it doesn t get
solutions that are good for the individual, but the biggest challenge ahead of us isn t technology, it s public acceptance. it s support for improved permitting and collaboration on changes to ensure that migration patterns for birds are known and we don t site wind turbines in those areas or wind farms in that space. but there can tjust be a wholesale rejection of this technology because of the threat of something that would be negative. that collaboration is the real opportunity for us to work together. so it s a partnership, really, it s you delivering the technologies that make the future possible, and us adopting them and making the right choices to protect us from this growing threat. thank you so much. we re going to move to questions now. this is the engineers: clean energy. we ve been discussing the future of solar energy, wind power and electrical storage, and i m going to ask who would like to ask a question of any of our clean energy engineers.
is a tandem cell, two solar cells on top of each other. and the perovskite we can tune to match perfectly silicon. it absorbs only the visible light and we let the silicon absorb all the infrared. and in doing that we actually fundamentally improve the efficiencies. if we made a perfect perovskite on silicon tandem cell, that would top out at about 45%, so we ve fundamentally lifted the ceiling. and if we went one step further to anotherjunction, triple junction, three junctions, that would top out at just above 50%. so what perovskite does is lift the ceiling for potential efficiency and gives us a new path forward to go to higher and higher efficiency. so, i mean, substantial gains in efficiency here. how close is this really to being a real technology? is this now, or this is far flung future? this is very near term.
out in the world, it d be 24% reduction in cost. and as you continue to see volume increase in these technologies you will continue to see cost reduction. thank you so much, danielle. so we are now going to go to scotland, to alastair, who has a question about nuclear energy. alastair? hello, today we ve got representatives of wind and solar, which are often portrayed as the two examples of clean energy. but there are still huge challenges with the amount of land required and energy storage required challenges which aren t faced by existing nuclear power technology, something i would argue we really need to prioritise. i wonder if you think nuclear should form a key part of the clean energy mix, and should be a large part of the discussion today, and if not, how do we ensure we invest in and choose the most effective technologies that are going to make the biggest difference to stopping climate change? i m going to give that one over to kristian here. nuclear, it s a fair point, isn