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.”
Cell performance can be raised “to make it just as good as if they’d used very expensive material”, he said.
Industry partners
Six solar PV companies have signed up as industry partners with UNSW, including China Sunergy last week, and the number is likely to double, Professor Wenham said.
About 1.6 million Australian homes have rooftop PV, with installations roughly doubling over the past two years. During last week’s heatwave, solar PV contributed as much as 10 per cent of SA’s power needs and 3 per cent of Victoria’s, helping to ease the strain on supplies.
UNSW’s labs set the record for PV cells in 2008, achieving 25 per cent efficiency. Martin Green, director of the university’s Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, said the school’s researchers were working to get 30 per cent efficiency by stacking cells made from materials that could use a wider range of the solar spectrum.
“Silicon cells convert red sunlight very efficiently but the blue and green sunlight less efficiently,” Professor Green said. “We think ultimately something like 40 per cent might be achievable by this stacking approach,” he said, adding that such performance “might come within the decade”.
“The industry will eventually get there,” Professor Green said. “We’re just trying to accelerate the time it would otherwise have taken.”
Even if it takes a decade or more for large-scale production of cells with 30 per cent or higher efficiency, PV in Australia is already close to or at “grid parity” with retail prices of electricity, Professor Wenham said.
During last week’s heatwave over south-eastern states, some consumers were paying up to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, he said. “PV can generate electricity at basically half that.”
UNSW, which claims to have been the first in the world to offer undergraduate degrees in PV, now has more than 600 students enrolled in under and postgraduate courses.
