The California Energy Commission, along with the Regents of the University of California, approved a $1.45 million grant to researchers at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) to support the development of perovskite solar cells.

USCD is home to varied perovskite-based research, among which is work focused on understanding the charge transport and recombination mechanisms in perovskite based solar cells.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) developed a new perovskite ink with a long processing window that allows the scalable production of perovskite solar cells.

To create a perovskite film, a coating of chemicals is deposited on a substrate and heated to fully crystalize the material. The various steps involved often overlap with each other and complicate the process. One extremely critical stage requires the addition of an antisolvent that extracts the precursor chemicals, and thus create crystals of good quality. The window for this step opens and closes within seconds, which is detrimental for manufacturing due to the precision required to make this time window. NREL researchers were able to keep that window open as long as 8 minutes.