A New Generation of Solar Panels Could Produce 25% More Electricity and Shake Up the Global Energy Industry

A second light-absorbing layer could shake up the solar energy market— if they last.

Solar manufacturers have wrung more electricity from essentially the same basic device: a wafer of silicon sitting beneath the sun. But silicon’s energy-harvesting potential has hit a ceiling. To make the next big leap, manufacturers are beginning to stack another solar cell on top.

The resulting devices, known as tandem solar panels, could produce roughly 25 percent more electricity than many panels sold today. Several manufacturers say they are approaching large-scale commercialization that would make such solar panels economically viable, raising the prospect of solar farms that generate more power without swallowing more land — and rooftops that yield substantially more electricity without getting any bigger.

“It is the next frontier,” Mike Carr, executive director of the Solar Energy Manufacturers for America Coalition, told The New York Times.

The technology could also shake up a solar manufacturing industry overwhelmingly dominated by China. But any suggestion that American manufacturers have the field to themselves, despite claims of having a head start, comes with a major caveat: Chinese companies are also racing toward the same goal. And some currently hold the most impressive efficiency records.

The appeal of tandems comes down to a limitation of ordinary solar cells. Silicon cannot efficiently harvest every part of sunlight’s spectrum. A second material — most often a class of compounds called perovskites — can sit above silicon and capture wavelengths that silicon handles less effectively. The lower cell collects much of what passes through.

As the U.S. Department of Energy explains in its guide to perovskite solar technology, pairing materials that absorb different colors of light allows a tandem device to squeeze more electricity from the same patch of sunshine. What kept these devices from grabbing market share so far has been cost, but that may soon change.

The efficiency race has accelerated

In July, Chinese solar giant LONGi announced that one of their perovskite-silicon tandem cell had reached a certified efficiency of 35.5 percent. The company has also reported 31.4 percent efficiency for a tandem module, a more commercially relevant device made from multiple cells. LONGi said the cell result had been independently certified by the European Solar Test Installation.

By comparison, even the best conventional silicon cells convert roughly 27 percent of incoming sunlight into electricity, very close to the absolute theoretical limit of 29 percent efficiency. This is a ceiling that is impossible to be engineered away using just silicon. Some lower-energy photons pass through the silicon without being captured, while higher-energy photons carry more energy than silicon can use and lose much of that excess as heat.

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Tandem cells get around that bottleneck by giving different parts of sunlight to different materials. A perovskite layer on top can efficiently capture higher-energy light, while the silicon layer underneath collects most of the lower-energy light that passes through. Theoretically, 40 percent is possible to reach with tandem panels.

The technology has already started to move towards consumers. In 2024, British-German company Oxford PV announced the first commercial shipment of perovskite-silicon tandem panels to a U.S. customer. Its panels were designed to deliver up to 20 percent more energy than standard silicon products.

American and U.S.-based manufacturers now want to scale the idea much further. Qcells has tested tandem panels in laboratories and outdoor sites around the world, subjecting them to intense light, heat and impacts from simulated hail.

In July 2026, the company announced that its technology had become the first tandem design to receive TÜV Rheinland certification confirming compliance with relevant UL and International Electrotechnical Commission standards.

“The power industry is quite conservative in accepting new technologies,” Fabian Fertig, Qcells’ head of tandem research and development, told The New York Times. “We’ve been focused on stability. We have to convince banks that this new technology can deliver.”

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A solar panel has to last decades close to peak efficiency, not weeks

For buyers, however, efficiency is only one part of the equation. The hardest tests are yet to come.

A utility does not order a certain solar panel because it set a laboratory record. Developers and lenders expect to make energy (and money) from their modules for 20 or 30 years while enduring heat, moisture, ultraviolet light, frost, wind and hail. And of course, they want the best price for generated kW possible.

Perovskites have historically struggled with reliability, at least compared to the robustness of silicon panels. Researchers have made rapid progress, but the durability question has not disappeared. A 2026 study in Nature Synthesis reported a tandem cell retaining 95 percent of its initial performance after 1,100 hours of continuous illumination. But that’s just six and a half weeks. Conventional silicon modules are typically expected to operate for 25 to 30 years, and modern performance warranties increasingly stretch to 30 years. Industry projections cited by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory put expected degradation for silicon modules at only around 0.4 percent per year over much of that period.

For tandem panels to displace it at utility scale, manufacturers must convince developers and their lenders that the extra efficiency will still be there many years after installation.

“There are all these questions around how long they actually last,” Chetan Krishna of the sustainability research organization RMI told The New York Times. “Are there degradation issues that we don’t know yet?”

Then there is cost.

Limitations and the march of progress

Early tandem panels can be considerably more expensive than silicon modules entering one of the most brutally competitive manufacturing markets on Earth. Global factories can already make far more conventional solar modules than the world installs each year, helping drive prices to extraordinary lows. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that global module manufacturing capacity had grown to more than twice annual deployments by 2024.

That scale overwhelmingly favors China. The IEA estimates that China accounts for roughly 85 percent of solar supply-chain production capacity, including about 95 percent of wafer capacity.

So, tandem technology will not automatically loosen China’s grip. It may instead create a new technological battleground.

Still, what it lacks in cost and durability may be offset by tandem’s reduced land requirements. A tandem panel that generates substantially more electricity from the same area reduces the land, mounting hardware and cabling needed for a given amount of power. As U.S. electricity demand rises, extracting another fifth or quarter of energy from the same sunny acre could become increasingly valuable.

Scott Wharton, chief executive of California-based Tandem PV, sees the transition as inevitable.

“There’s no debate in the industry that we will move to tandems,” he told The New York Times.