LONGi Hits 35.5% Solar Cell Record, Unleashing New Climate Potential

Every tenth of a percent in solar conversion efficiency chips away at the land, material, and balance-of-system costs that determine how quickly renewables can edge out coal and gas. LONGi's new 35.5% world record—backed by industrial-scale results of 34.3%—promises to slash the levelized cost of solar electricity and bring the 43% theoretical maximum for tandem cells into realistic view, a critical boost for global decarbonization timelines.

LONGi has shattered the world record for crystalline silicon-perovskite tandem solar cell efficiency, reaching a certified 35.5% at the 2026 Solar and Energy Storage Innovation Conference in Shanghai. This achievement, verified by the European Solar Test Installation (ESTI), exceeds the company's previous record of 34.6% set in June 2024 and demonstrates a remarkable acceleration in R&D: the team pushed from 33.9% in November 2023 to 35.5% in just over two and a half years. The tandem technology combines a conventional silicon bottom cell with a perovskite top cell, leveraging complementary absorption spectra to achieve a theoretical efficiency limit of 43%—far beyond the 33.7% Shockley-Queisser cap for single-junction devices. LONGi's breakthrough is not confined to laboratory-scale cells; on industrial dimensions of 261 cm² and 274 cm², conversion efficiencies reached 34.3% and 32.2%, respectively, while full modules achieved 31.4% and 29.4%. These figures, also independently certified, underscore the technology's rapid progression toward commercial viability. The inclusion of the 35.2% milestone in the 68th Solar Cell Efficiency Tables (May 2026) by Professor Martin Green's team at UNSW further validates the significance of this advance.

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LONGi's breakthrough is not confined to laboratory-scale cells; on industrial dimensions of 261 cm² and 274 cm², conversion efficiencies reached 34.3% and 32.2%, respectively, while full modules achieved 31.4% and 29.4%.

Contextually, crystalline silicon-perovskite tandems are the leading candidate to push utility-scale solar beyond the 30% efficiency barrier, which has constrained single-junction silicon's dominance. Each percentage point gain in conversion efficiency translates directly into higher power output per square meter of panel area, reducing balance-of-system costs and land requirements—critical for solar's competitiveness against fossil fuels and for siting projects in space-constrained regions. LONGi's ability to iterate rapidly—from 34.85% to 35.2% and now 35.5% within roughly a year—suggests deep institutional knowledge and sophisticated process engineering at its Central Research Institute. The parallel achievement of 34.3% on 261 cm² cells, only 1.2 percentage points behind the world-record small-area cell, indicates that the efficiency loss during scale-up is manageable and narrowing.