Five colleges are joining forces to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of solar energy technologies through research and development.
SUNY New Paltz, Cornell University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Clarkson University and Binghamton University will partner with industry to achieve those goals, according to The Solar Energy Consortium.
TSEC is a group of business and academic leaders in Ulster County working to develop an incubator for clean-tech industry in the region.
The announcement concerning the colleges came Dec. 4 at the Haggerty Administration Building on the SUNY New Paltz campus.
“This is a coming together of the huge intellectual resources of some of the best research institutions right here in New York. We want to make The Solar Energy Consortium as important and effective as it can be,” said U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-Hurley, who has been instrumental in obtaining federal funds.
Noting that other countries, including Germany, Japan, and Spain, have launched similar initiatives, Hinchey said the TSEC is the only such incubator established in the nation. “New York state can take the lead for our country. To see the importance of us to do that, just stop at a gas station. The price of oil is approaching $100 a barrel and it”™s likely before too long to reach $200 a barrel.”
Vincent Cozzolino, TSEC”™s chief executive officer, stressed the boost to economic development. The state will not only spawn a new industry, but also represents a potentially lucrative market.
“We”™ll make solar energy systems more efficient in New York, cut the cost in half and simplify the installations,” Cozzolino said.
Alan Ginsberg, a principal at AG Cos., which owns TechCity in Kingston, where TSEC hopes to be headquartered, announced that he would offer a research facility for the universities at the complex rent free.
Asked how the schools, which are sometimes competitors, will work together, Dr. Nag Patibandla, director of the center for future energy systems at RPI, said the coalition was based upon the concept of a shared facility, in which all parties focus on their different areas of expertise in order to collectively solve a bigger problem.
For example, Cornell has been using its expertise in materials and nanotechnology to try to develop less expensive alternatives to silicon, which is used to make solar cells.
“A lot of our faculty work on organic electronics,” said Charles Kruzansky, director and special assistant to the vice provost for research at Cornell University, noting that the research extends to flexible displays. “We have the biggest research team in the country working on this. We”™re also working with several companies on ways to use less silicon per cell.”
Researchers at Clarkson are working on ways to manufacture solar cells out of thin films of silicon rather than wafers, which would reduce the cost of production. Currently, solar cells are produced from silicon processed in a vacuum chamber, similar to a micro-electronic device. RPI researchers are seeking to develop a process technology that doesn”™t require the vacuum chamber and can utilize larger sections of silicon.
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Cozzolino said so far the consortium had $9 million in the bank, a combination of federal appropriations, Empire State Development money, and “odds and ends beyond that.” Earlier this year, Empire State Development announced it was making available $1.5 million in grants for clean tech companies that might be involved with TSEC.
The consortium “needs to be competitive at getting grants at the federal level, from the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture,” said John Harrington, a retired dean at SUNY New Paltz who is TSEC”™s vice president of research and development.
He also said the “environmental and energy folks” at the state level were “extremely interested in what we”™re doing.” He was hopeful TSEC would be getting more support from the state.
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