Solar energy has extraordinary potential to address three daunting challenges the world faces in the next 50 years:

Finding new sources of energy to supply energy demand that will be at least twice today's demand;

Reducing the production of harmful pollutants that threaten human health; and

Reducing the rate of greenhouse gas emissions that accelerate global warming.

These three challenges are intimately related: 85% of global energy now comes from fossil fuels, the source of most of the human-derived pollutants and greenhouse gases vented to the atmosphere.

Sunlight is by far the world's most abundant energy resource. In just a day and a half, the sun delivers to Earth as much energy as is contained in all the oil that was ever created in geologic time. In one hour, the Sun delivers to Earth as much energy as humans produce in one year using coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, and nuclear power combined. Beyond its huge capacity, solar energy is benign to the environment and climate; it produces no health-threatening pollutants or greenhouse gases that accelerate global warming.

Mission Statement

The Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research (ANSER) Center's mission is to find new approaches for exploiting the sunlight's enormous potential to supply human energy needs. The ANSER Center's broad portfolio of cross-disciplinary basic research is aimed at providing innovative solutions to the challenging technical problems of putting solar energy to work.

Four strategies are being developed:

The conversion of sunlight to fuel using bio-inspired artificial photosynthesis;

The conversion of sunlight to electricity by developing innovative organic solar cells;

The conversion of sunlight to electricity by developing hybrid organic-inorganic solar cells; and

The conversion of solar heat to electricity using novel thermoelectric materials.

These four opportunities for converting solar energy to human use have extraordinary potential to meet the global challenges of energy, environment and climate that face our nation in the coming half-century.

Vasil Sidorov on September 12, 2009 E-mail: sidorovvasil@gmail.com

From Argonne National Laboratory Reports