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（TWs）的电力。量子能源和可持续太阳能技术（QESST） ERC将通过开发具有更高效率和新功能的光伏（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将通过避免效率提高和成本降低之间的权衡，实现光伏发电（PV）的大规模持续增长，从而满足TW的挑战，允许PV设备可扩展到商业生产，并为持续改进性能和可负担性提供途径。支持这一目标的第一个推动力是通过技术和政策的发展，直接解决能源生产系统本身的问题，这些技术和政策将允许新型光伏设备大规模生产，使光伏产业能够迅速达到2万亿美元的能源生产水平。QESST的第二个目标是通过太阳能电池效率的突破性改进，为光伏发电制定“摩尔定律”，最终实现每单位体积材料产生更高能量的结构，这是驱动成本降低的主要参数。最后，第三个推力通过基础研究来增加其他两个推力，通过各种最先进的方法来实现太阳能到电力转换的理论热力学极限（~85%），这些方法克服了单个带隙太阳能电池的局限性（~32%）。这些涉及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的进展。

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.