An international team of researchers, including experts from Monash University, has developed a world-first, commercially sized tandem solar cell that eliminates the need for a scarce and expensive metal.
The breakthrough… replaces costly indium-based oxide with abundant tin oxide. The new material costs just one per cent of the price of indium, achieving this dramatic cost reduction without sacrificing the solar cell’s performance.
(Tandem cells capture more of the solar spectrum by stacking multiple layers with different bandgaps.)
It appears to make this type of cell better, not perfect.
Press release and news article often inflate the significance of new research. This is a nice incremental improvement that decrease cost of one of the several source materials. It’s not an earth shattering breakthrough, it doesn’t slash the overall panel cost by 100.