Energy Yield Advantages of Three-Terminal Perovskite-Silicon Tandem Photovoltaics

The fast progress of perovskite-based tandem photovoltaic technology raises the need to identify optimal double-junction tandem architectures with regard to energy yield (EY) under realistic irradiation conditions. Recently, the three-terminal (3T) perovskite-silicon tandem architecture was prototyped for the first time. This technology bears great promise as it combines the advantages of two-terminal (2T) and four-terminal (4T) architectures. This numerical study provides a systematic EY-modeling analysis for perovskite-silicon tandem architectures. According to our study, the 3T architecture delivers the highest EY (from 3% to 9% relative) in every climatic condition, due to ∼6% larger photogenerated current density in the absorber layers compared with 4T architecture and a higher robustness to spectral variations compared with 2T architecture. Finally, we show that the standard deviation of the average utilizable photon energy can be used to predict the gain in EY of 3T architecture compared with 2T architecture.