One of the big questions for humanity's future is: how will we supply enough clean and plentiful energy to sustain a growing global population? With organisations such as Population Matters predicting global population to increase from seven billion to ten billion by 2050 and a growing middle class in the developing world demanding increasing levels of energy, the world faces demands both to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiency and provide a reliable, secure supply of energy. At face value, the big question has a simple answer: solar. In theory, the world's demand could be met by just one thousandth of the sun's energy landing on Earth. In practice, solar accounted for 1.1 per cent of global power generation in 2015. To narrow the gap between theory and practice, we need to look at next-generation technologies that can take solar into the mainstream. And the technology with the greatest potential is perovskites.
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