Photovoltaic Center Wins DOE Grant

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded three Columbia scientists a $16 million grant to fund a proposal to establish a research center at Columbia to make photovoltaic technology more efficient.

The proposal is co-directed by Electrical Engineering Senior Research Scientist James Yardley, Tony Heinz, professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics, and Louis Brus, Professor of Chemistry.

 

The award triggers an additional $1.6 million each from the state of New York and Columbia University, bringing the total funding to $19.2 million spread out over five years.

 

The proposal is one of 46 new multi-million-dollar Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) announced today by the White House, in conjunction with a speech delivered by President Barack Obama at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. The EFRCs, which will pursue advanced scientific research on energy, are being established by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science at universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations and private firms across the nation.

 

Yardley, director of the Columbia Center for Integrated Science and Engineering (CISE), describes the goal of the proposal as creating “… enabling technology which will redefine photovoltaic efficiency through fundamental understanding and molecule-scale control of the key steps in the photovoltaic process in organic and hybrid materials.”

The program builds on the significant success of the NSF-sponsored Columbia Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) and on ongoing partnerships with the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) along with strategic partnerships with University of Arkansas, Purdue University and University of Minnesota and collaborations with Tel Aviv University.

Yardley said the EFRC will capitalize on the synergy between theory, measurement, and materials that has distinguished the Columbia Nanocenter in the development of fundamental understanding and control of charge transport in molecular and nanoscale systems.

The 46 EFRCs, to be funded at $2-5 million per year each for a planned initial five-year period, were selected from a pool of some 260 applications received in response to a solicitation issued by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science in 2008. Selection was based on a rigorous merit review process utilizing outside panels composed of scientific experts.