CREST wins £4.8M grants in UK-India solar collaborations
The Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST) of Loughborough University wins £4.8M grants in UK-India collaborative research initiative in Solar Energy
The UK and India are both rising stars in the generation of electricity from the sun (photovoltaics, or PV in short). In the UK, PV is seen as a key technology to reduce the carbon foot-print of the electricity generation. It is also a necessity if future building standards are to be met, which will require on-site generation. PV is the only way to meet this to date. In India PV has the added benefit that it is a highly scalable technology that can be deployed to support the grid infrastructure and indeed can be built possibly faster than conventional power plants. The governments of the UK and India have jointly identified Solar Energy as an area of significance in providing solutions to the problem of meeting future energy needs, decided that it would be important to link the strengths of both countries to enhance the research capabilities of both nations. This was facilitated by a call for research proposals from international partnerships. Overall 17 bids were received and Loughborough University is delighted to announce that the two projects chosen, STAPP and APEX, were those led by Professor Ralph Gottschalg and Dr Hari Upadhyaya, respectively.
Stability and Performance of Photovoltaics (STAPP).
STAPP does not focus on the materials development but aims to understand the long term behaviour of photovoltaic technologies in general and the wider aspects of the usage of this technology. UK research partners are Imperial College London, University of Strathclyde and Northumbria University. Indian research partners are the Indian Institutes of Technology in Bombay (Indian Lead), Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and the Solar Energy Centre, Delhi.
Advancing the Efficiency and Production Potential of Excitonic Solar Cells (APEX).
APEX will focus on the development of new functional materials, device structures, materials processing and engineering of photovoltaic modules utilising excitonic solar cells (ESCs) These are a class of nano-structured solar cells based on organic nano-composites and dye-sensitised nanocrystalline TiO2 materials. UK research partners in this project are Imperial College London, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge and University of Edinburgh. National Physical Laboratory Delhi (Indian Lead), National Chemical Laboratory Pune, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research Bangalore, Indian Institute of Technology Dehli, Indian Institute of Chemical Technology Hyderabad and Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
APEX and STAPP also received significant industrial support both from the UK and India, reflecting the high impact they are expected to achieve. Each project is a multi-university, multi-company partnership and forms part of the Research Councils of the UK, RCUK, Energy Programme led by EPSRC and the Solar Energy Research Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology, DST, India.
“We are all delighted at this success which affirms the leading role which Loughborough and in particular the team from CREST plays in the national and international renewable energy arena,” says Professor Shirley Pearce, the University’s Vice Chancellor. “It is the outcome of a long-term, multi-million pound strategic investment by the university in the front line of this globally critical research and we are proud to be playing our part.”