Antinuclear

Award to Australian university team for cost-cutting solar technology

Bright sparks scoop top award for cutting cost of solar power, The Age, 20  Jan 14 Peter Hannam  ENVIRONMENT EDITOR, THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD AUSTRALIA’S WORLD-LEADING EFFORTS TO DRIVE DOWN THE COST OF SOLAR ENERGY HAVE BEEN RECOGNISED WITH AN AUSTRALIA-BASED RESEARCHER TAKING OUT THE ENGINEERING EQUIVALENT OF THE OSCARS.

Professor Stuart Wenham and his team at the University of NSW won this year’s A. F. Harvey Engineering Research Prize from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and plan to plough the $560,000 award – one of the world’s richest – back into their work. “The prizemoney is going to be very valuable for us,” Professor Wenham said. “We’re going to use that to expand one of the research areas that actually contributed to winning us the prize.”

As Fairfax Media reported in May, Professor Wenham’s team discovered methods to control hydrogen atoms to correct deficiencies in silicon, the most costly material in solar photovoltaic (PV) cells.

As a result of the new hydrogenation process, lower-quality low-cost silicon can achieve the same performance as typical commercial cells using the expensive high-purity silicon, which now convert about 17-20 per cent of the sun’s energy into electricity.”

January 20, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | New South Wales, solar