NSF Engineering Research Center for Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies: QESST

一个主要的社会挑战是在对环境影响最小的情况下产生太瓦(TW)的电力。量子能源和可持续太阳能技术(QESST)ERC将通过开发效率更高、功能新颖的光伏(PV)技术，将现有的发电系统转变为可持续和无处不在的发电系统。QESST将应对TW挑战，通过规避效率提高和成本降低之间的权衡，实现光伏(PV)发电量的大幅、持续增长，使光伏设备能够扩展到商业生产，并为不断提高性能和价格提供途径。支持这一目标的第一个推动力直接针对能源发电系统本身，通过开发技术和政策，允许将新型光伏设备扩大到大规模制造，使光伏行业能够迅速达到太瓦级的能源生产水平。QESST的第二个目标是通过对太阳能电池效率的突破性改进，为光伏制定一条“摩尔定律”，最终实现单位体积材料发电量大幅提高的结构，这是推动成本降低的主要参数。最后，第三个推力通过基础研究的方式增加了另外两个，这些基础研究旨在通过各种最先进的方法来克服单一带隙太阳能电池的限制(~32%)，以实现太阳能到电转换的理论热力学极限(~85%)。这些进展包括基础材料科学和缺陷控制、光子学和光捕获、能量转换科学以及先进的纳米制造和表征技术。

A major societal challenge is to generate terawatts (TWs) of electricity with minimal environmental impact. The Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies (QESST) ERC will transform the existing electricity generation system towards a sustainable and ubiquitous one by developing photovoltaic (PV) technologies with higher efficiency and novel functionality. QESST will meet the TW challenge by enabling a large, sustained growth rate of photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation by circumventing the trade-off between efficiency increases and cost decreases, allowing PV devices that are scalable to commercial production and which provide a route for continuous improvements in performance and affordability. The first thrust supporting this goal directly addresses the energy generation system itself through development of technologies and policies which will allow the scale-up of novel PV devices into large-scale manufacturing, enabling the PV industry to rapidly reach TW levels of energy production. QESST's second thrust seeks to charter a "Moore's Law" for photovoltaics via breakthrough improvements in solar cell efficiencies to ultimately realize structures with dramatically higher energy generation per unit volume of material, a primary parameter driving cost reduction. Finally,the third thrust augments the other two by means of fundamental research directed towards realizing the theoretical thermodynamic limit of solar-to-electric conversion (~85%) through a variety of state-of-the-art approaches which overcome the limitations of single bandgap solar cells (~32%). These involve advances in basic material science and defect control, photonics and light trapping, energy conversion science, and advanced nanofabrication and characterization techniques.