There is a pressing need to reshape the world energy economy and shift to a sustainable, zero-carbon economy within the next 20-30 years. This sets huge scientific challenges but also offers enormous opportunities.
To achieve a zero-carbon future we need both incremental improvements of existing technologies, but also new science and new materials to make use of the significant headroom that remains for improving the performance, cost, reliability, and sustainability of our energy technologies. Research in Energy Materials in the Cavendish is covering three broad research directions in energy generation, energy storage and energy use.
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Researchers associated with this theme
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Research areas
Energy generation: There remain huge opportunities for improving the energy conversion efficiency of renewable electricity generation and to develop new ways for harvesting solar photons and other, currently unused energy sources.
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Energy storage and transmission: The electrification of large sectors of our energy economy and the large-scale generation of electricity from intermittent renewable sources requires cheaper, more reliable batteries with higher storage capacity as well as new approaches for lossless transmission of electricity over long distances.
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Energy use: The proportion of electricity used for ICT has been predicted to reach 20% of total electricity demand by 2030. We urgently need to develop new computing paradigms that can process information with orders of magnitude less energy than what is currently possible.
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Researchers and Research Groups associated with this theme
Prof Jeremy J Baumberg FRS, FRSCPlasmonics |
Dr Chiara CiccarelliSpintronics |
Dr Ibrahim DarPerovskite photovoltaics, light-emitting diodes |
Prof Sian E DuttonMaterials for batteries, photovoltaics, magnetocalorics, ferroelectrics |
Dr Tijmen Godfried EuserOperando spectroscopy, photocatalysis, fibre-optic sensing |
Prof Richard Friend FRSOptoelectronics, photovoltaics, light-emitting diodes |
Prof Neil GreenhamOptoelectronics, photovoltaics, light-emitting diodes |
Dr Louise HirstPhotovoltaics and photonics |
Dr Ian JacobsThermoelectrics, radiative cooling |
Dr Bartomeu MonserratTheory of energy materials |
Prof Akshay RaoOptoelectronics, photovoltaics, Ultrafast spectroscopy and microscopy, Optical probes of Electrochemistry |
Prof Suchitra SebastianSuperconductors |
Prof Henning Sirringhaus FRSCharge transport physics, thermoelectrics |
Prof Sam StranksOptoelectronics, photovoltaics, light-emitting diodes |
Dr Deepak VenkateshvaranMolecular nanoscale mechanics |