Bendable solar panels just set a record — 26.86% efficiency, and they survived the heat

Solar panels are usually stiff glass slabs. A team at Southeast University and Soochow University in China has pushed the bendy kind — thin perovskite panels that could one day curve over backpacks, tents and car roofs — to a third-party certified record efficiency of 26.86%. Perovskite is a cheap crystal that turns sunlight into electricity, but printing it onto flexible sheets made its two working layers react with each other and break down in heat and humidity. The team's fix is a new 'decoupling' molecule that stops the layers interfering — an atomic referee. A small flexible panel kept 92.5% of its power after 1,044 hours at 85°C (185°F) in humid air, and the modules passed the industry's IEC 63163 stability tests. The work, published in Science, is a real step toward solar you can roll up and take anywhere.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation