A new tandem solar cell just hit 28.04% efficiency. It's flexible, stable, and published in Nature.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0800

There’s a quiet tension in solar energy research between record-breaking lab results and real-world durability. A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences just published a result in Nature that bridges both sides: a perovskite-organic tandem solar cell with a certified 28.04% steady-state efficiency — a world record for its class — that also survived 625 hours of continuous operation with only 10% degradation.

Conventional single-junction solar cells — the silicon panels on rooftops and in solar farms — use one material to absorb sunlight. That means they capture only a fraction of the available spectrum: high-energy and low-energy photons both get processed at the same mediocre efficiency, leaving significant potential untapped. Tandem cells solve this by stacking two different light-absorbing materials, each tuned to a specific slice of the solar spectrum.

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A new tandem solar cell just hit 28.04% efficiency. It's flexible, stable, and published in Nature.