Solar Charging Batteries: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

Energy for a sustainable future motivates today's R&D, enabling technologies such as smart consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and smart grids. These technologies demand the use of batteries. Sunlight, an abundant clean source of energy, can alleviate the energy limits of batteries, while batteries can address photovoltaic intermittency. This perspective paper focuses on advancing concepts in PV-battery system design while providing critical discussion, review, and prospect. Reports on discrete and integrated PV-battery designs are discussed. Three key technical challenges, namely energy density, efficiency, and stability, toward further advancement of integrated PV-battery systems are discussed. We present a perspective on opportunities and future directions, highlighting key strategies on developing such PV-battery systems. Key focus should be on the development of innovative designs that incorporates high-capacity, efficient, and stable materials, emphasizing the demonstration of practical viability of such integrated PV-battery systems.