In December 2024, Hanwha Qcells reached 28.6 percent efficiency on a full M10-sized cell (330.56 square centimeters), a result independently verified by Fraunhofer ISE CalLab. Separately, TUV Rheinland confirmed the cells passed IEC 61215 stress tests in May 2025. That is a full-size commercial cell, not a lab device, and the efficiency number exceeds what Oxford PV has shipped. Qcells has a major manufacturing footprint in Korea and the United States, and its Q.ANTUM technology platform is the basis for its perovskite-silicon tandem development.
LONGi, the Chinese solar manufacturing giant, achieved a NREL-certified 34.85 percent efficiency on a 1 square centimeter tandem device in April 2025, and by June 2025 at SNEC had demonstrated 33.0 percent on a 260.9 square centimeter large-area cell according to Nature Energy. That is the largest efficient tandem cell in the publicly reported record set, from the company that manufactures more silicon solar modules than anyone else in the world. LONGi is not a perovskite startup; it is a silicon solar company developing perovskite-silicon tandems as an upgrade path for its existing infrastructure. If perovskite-silicon tandems become manufacturable at scale, LONGi has the capacity to produce them in quantities that would reshape the market.
The most recent commercial data point is GCL Optoelectronics, a Chinese perovskite manufacturer that won a 1.2 megawatt commercial perovskite-silicon tandem module order from the Huaneng Clean Energy Research Institute, with delivery scheduled for the end of June 2026, as reported by Perovskite-Info. The order requires full IEC 61215 and IEC 61730 certification, supply capability from a production line of at least 100 megawatts, and outdoor degradation performance consistent with a 25-year service life warranty. That is a real commercial order, with a real certification requirement, from a real power company. If GCL delivers it in June 2026, the technology graduates from demonstration to product with a reference installation. If they miss the certification window or the degradation numbers drift, it will be another data point in a long history of near-misses.
The cost problem is not abstract. As of early 2026, high-efficiency crystalline silicon modules in Europe trade in the range of 0.12 to 0.16 per watt. Perovskite module manufacturing costs are estimated at approximately 0.57 per watt. That is a 3.5-to-1 cost gap. Closing it requires simultaneous progress on manufacturing scale and stability performance that justifies a 25-year warranty. The raw materials for perovskites are abundant and cheap. The problem is manufacturing yield: perovskite deposition over large areas is difficult to control, and variations in film uniformity produce efficiency losses that stack up across a module. Every percentage point lost to non-uniformity is a percentage point that does not appear in the power output or the revenue the module generates over its operating life.
The Lee et al. paper does not solve the cost gap. It does not demonstrate a module. It does not prove that CCI will work at scale. What it does is propose a mechanistic explanation for why the efficiency-stability tradeoff, the defining failure mode of perovskite research for fifteen years, might be tractable in a way it has not been before according to Nature Energy. The 2D/3D contact interaction that drives CCI is fundamentally different from solution-based layer engineering because it does not rely on permanent bonding. That means the material system may have a built-in resilience mechanism that solution-processed films lack. The projected lifetime of 24,800 hours is an extrapolation, not a measurement. But it is an extrapolation based on 2,000 hours of actual operating data with 95.2 percent retention, and the mechanism explanation tells you why the retention happened rather than just reporting that it did, as detailed in Nature Photonics.
Whether CCI scales from a 1-square-centimeter lab cell to a full M10-sized commercial cell is the question that matters next. Oxford PV, Qcells, LONGi, and GCL are all working on that problem from different angles. The first answer arrives in June 2026, when GCL is supposed to deliver a 1.2 megawatt certified module to Huaneng. If that module performs to spec, the perovskite story changes from a technology looking for an application to a technology with a commercial reference installation. If it does not, the Lee et al. result remains an important paper about a mechanism that did not survive contact
