Spectral effects on the energy harvesting efficiency of 2- and 4-terminal tandem photovoltaics

Abstract

In this work, we investigate how a varying spectral irradiance and top cell bandgap affect the energy yield of 2T and 4T perovskite//silicon tandem solar cells under outdoor operating conditions. For the comparison, we first validate an optoelectronic model employing a 1-year outdoor data set for a 4T mechanical stacked GaAs on Silicon tandem device. We then use our verified model to simulate perovskite//silicon tandem devices with a varying perovskite top cell bandgap for a location in Golden, Colorado, USA. We introduce a spectral binning method to efficiently reduce and improve the visualization of the 1-min-resolved environmental data while maintaining the simulation accuracy. Our findings reveal that, for a device that is current-matched under standard testing conditions, the annual spectral deviation reduces the energy harvesting efficiency by only 2%$_\mathrm{rel}$. When additional realistic losses for the 4T are taken into account, 2T devices are shown to have an energy-harvesting efficiency that is at parity or higher. Deviations in the top cell bandgap of more than 0.1 eV from current matching result in a reduced energy-harvesting efficiency of more than 5%$_\mathrm{rel}$ for the 2T tandem device.