Stanford University's Precourt Institute for Energy, the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center and the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy have awarded eight seed grants totaling about $1.5m for new research in clean technology and energy efficiency.
“Seed funding supports early work on concepts that have the potential for very high impact on energy production and use,” says Precourt Institute director Sally Benson, a professor of energy resources engineering. “This year’s grants support an exciting array of bold, new ideas for advancing energy technology and policy – from revolutionizing power electronics, to the energy-neutral conversion of waste-water into drinking water and waste heat from computers into usable energy.”
Of the eight projects in total, there are three funded by the Precourt Institute for Energy specifically, namely on nanoscale heat transmission, on power electronics, and the following project on photovoltaics: ‘A novel technique for producing high-efficiency photovoltaic devices’: Since solar cells made of gallium arsenide (GaAs) hold the record for photovoltaic efficiency but are extremely expensive to produce, this project proposes using a novel laser lift-off technique to produce low-cost, single-crystal GaAs films for PV applications. The principal investigator (PI) for the project is Bruce Clemens, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Walter B. Reinhold Professor in the School of Engineering.
