“In just five years of experimenting with our stacked or multiple junction approach, we have increased power conversion efficiency from around 6% to over 27%,” said Shuaifeng Hu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics, in a press release. “We believe that over time, this approach could enable photovoltaic devices to achieve much higher efficiencies, exceeding 45%.”

While boosting these efficiency numbers is essential to harnessing all of the free, life-giving solar energy, this new solar technology has another advantage over its more conventional silicon sibling: it’s flexible. At just over a micron thick, 150 times thinner than silicon wafers, this technology functions more like a coating that can be applied to a nearly infinite number of surfaces, including backpacks, cars, and cell phones. This opens up even more surfaces that could potentially harness solar energy while reducing the need for energy from renewable sources.

This breakthrough comes with some caveats. For one, perovskites are notorious for not being as durable as other solar technologies (although scientists have made significant progress in solving this problem), and making solar cells in the lab is a very different matter than mass production. However, Oxford PV, a company spun out of Oxford University, was founded in 2010 to address many of these issues and primarily to commercialize perovskite photovoltaics. According to co-founder and chief scientific officer Henry Snaith, the company began mass producing Perovskite-on-silicon cells with a pilot production line in 2023.

“The latest innovations in solar materials and techniques that we have demonstrated in our labs could become the platform for a new industry that produces materials that can generate solar energy more sustainably and cost-effectively using existing buildings, vehicles and objects,” Snaith said in a press release.

Such innovations don’t mean we should slow down the construction of solar panels across the country—after all, tackling climate change is a matter that everyone has to pitch in to. But if solar panels can cover more land and capture more free energy, everyone wins.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about science fiction and how our world works. You can find his previous work at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.