Given America’s increasing need for efficient green energy generation and storage, we must maintain our innovative edge for materials development of photovoltaic devices using the power of the small, via nanostructured systems. I’m writing about a fresh view in environmental materials engineering: environmental premediation . An environmental materials area of research will complement the demand for CO2-free energy systems and energy efficient technologies in our country. The advances in Third Generation photovoltaics (including inorganic-sensitized solar cells, and dye-sensitized solar cells) have provided us with new alternatives for reduced-cost solar energy conversion. And now photovoltaic cells using quantum dots as light absorbing materials are on the verge of major breakthroughs. In fact, recent results from NREL (US Dept. of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory) have demonstrated that solid-state photovoltaic composites based on light-absorbing quantum dots show promise to provide up to 65% energy conversion efficiency (3x that of current Si cell limits). The future is wide open for discovering energy solutions using the tools of nanotechnology in materials science.
1) Ellingson, R. J.; Beard, M. C.; Johnson, J. C.; Yu, P.;Milic, O. I.; Nozick, A. J.; Shabaev, A.; Efros, A. J. Nano Lett. 2005 5(5), 865.
