Making energy clean and affordable
Society needs to rapidly decarbonize to avoid planetary-scale ecological and societal disasters. By far, energy use is the largest CO2 emissions sector, which clearly identifies a key component to solving the climate crisis: generate energy from (local) renewable resources. This also answers the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7, making energy clean and affordable. In many places all over the world, photovoltaics (solar panels) are the cheapest source of electricity.
The Netherlands has established itself as a thriving ecosystem for industry and academic researchers developing novel solar energy solutions, and can now boast as having the highest amount of solar installed per capita in Europe (2022-2023). Solar Centre Twente is a Centre of Expertise aimed at bringing together researchers to better connect interdisciplinary research between faculties, UT-wide education and (inter)national collaboration on the topic of solar energy. We focus on:
- Materials science for solar energy conversion, including criticality of materials & sustainability considerations
- Smart system integration and optimization
- Designing improved product-service combinations, including societal embedding and socio-techno perspectives