EEE’s Fthenakis Promotes Solar Power

Vasilis Fthenakis of the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering and founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Life Cycle Analysis (CLCA), is a leading proponent of solar energy. “The solar electric technologies are ready,” he says, “to provide 69% of the country’s electricity and 35% of its total energy needs by 2050.” His plan calls for covering huge tracts of land in the southwest deserts with photovoltaic and concentrating solar power systems that would send direct current (DC) electricity to all parts of the country through a new high-voltage power transmission system. 

In a lead article in Scientific American, Professor Fthenakis and his co-authors Zweibel and Mason argue that, given a commitment of $400 billion by the federal government over 40 years, the U.S. could free itself from dependence on imported oil and cut greenhouse gas emissions significantly. They project a decrease of 62% of carbon dioxide emissions by eliminating 300 coal-fired and 300 natural gas power plants and by use of hybrid vehicles that would refuel using the solar power grid. 

Fthenakis notes that his projections are based on established solar electric conversion and storage technologies, with just foreseeable near term improvements, and that if lower cost/higher efficiency third generation photovoltaics and advance storage systems become commercially available, solar energy could satisfy all the energy needs of the country at an even lower cost. 

 

Research by Professor Fthenakis at CLCA and at Brookhaven National Laboratories, where he has led the National PV Environmental Research Center since 1982, is analyzing various photovoltaic technologies to show which are most environmentally friendly over their lifetimes. Different forms of photovoltaics have different life cycle analysis (LCA) profiles, specific to heavy-metal emissions and electricity use.  He and his team have constructed information from databases of more than a dozen major solar companies making single-crystal silicon, multicrystal silicon, ribbon silicon, and thin-film solar cells, all of which have different efficiencies in converting sunlight into electricity. 

The team determined that among current technologies, thin-film cadmium telluride (CdTe) photovoltaics had the lowest energy payback times and the lowest emissions to the environment.  However, they found, all PV technologies generate far less life-cycle emissions per GWh than conventional fossil-fuel-based electricity generation technologies. The latest on his research appeared in the lead article of Environmental Science and Technology in March 2008 and also made the news in The New York Times,Science News, IEEE Spectrum, Scientific American, Spiegel and other European magazines and papers.

The Columbia and Brookhaven research centers have formed collaborations with universities and research centers around the world, including the University of Utrecht, the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands, University of Stuttgart, and Chalmers University. To learn more about the Center for Life Cycle Analysis, which also includes Nicholas Themelis, emeritus Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Paul Duby, Professor of Mineral Engineering, and Nikhil Krishnan, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering, go to: http://www.clca.columbia.edu/