Solar shines

If 2008 was the year of the Phoenix Mission, 2009 will surely be recorded as the UA's breakout year in solar energy research. Consider the announcements we made since the first of the year: • January — The Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy (AZRISE), the UA's interdisciplinary center for solar research, hosted a groundbreaking statewide summit in Phoenix to begin organizing a statewide dialogue on solar technologies and public policy. • February — UA Steward Observatory Mirror Lab director Roger Angel demonstrated to U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords heightened efficiency of solar electricity generation through inventive breakthroughs in concentrating sunlight. Angel is making great strides at concentrating sunlight in dish-shaped collectors that point at small but highly-efficient photovoltaic cells to produce high electrical yield. He and his team of professors and students already have demonstrated the power of his concentrators. Next, he plans to test the full system making electricity. • March — Biosphere 2 announced it would install 470 solar collectors to power parts of its conference center, and serve as one site for a global survey of solar collection capacities at different points around the planet. • April — The UA announced it will install solar devices on several UA buildings this summer to generate electricity and heat our large swimming pools. • May — The U.S. Department of Energy established an Energy Frontier Research Center at the UA. Neal Armstrong, a professor of chemistry and optical sciences, and a number of his colleagues at UA, are advancing a type of solar electric energy transducer made not of silicon crystals, but of modified formulations of red and blue dyes found in inkjet printers. These scientists are working to make photovoltaic devices that will be cheap, flexible and versatile enough to be placed on virtually any surface that holds paint or dye. Window awnings could produce electricity while they shade buildings from the sun. Backpacks, even clothing, could generate power to recharge cell phones or cameras. Prototypes are done and research to optimize them is underway. • June — Tucson Electric Power and the Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy have formed a partnership with the Tucson International Airport, Solon and Raytheon to build a large solar energy demonstration center that integrates photovoltaic electrical generation with energy storage and a smart grid and that houses a visitor center for the public. This year is not half over, and we are not done announcing progress in our various commitments to advancing solar technologies. The university's solar strategy So, what made all of these exciting developments possible, and what strategy do they reflect? They are possible because the UA is in the right geographic spot to lead the solar revolution, and because we have been at this research for a very long time. To the UA, solar research isn't a trendy arena in which we've just decided to compete. It's an area in which we have been building capacity for decades, which is beginning to pay off in earnest. First, the obvious: our geography and climate. We are a university bathed in more than 300 days of sunshine. About 1.5 gigawatts of noonday sunlight shines on our campus alone, enough energy to power all of Tucson. In fact, Arizona is exposed to enough sunlight to power the entire nation, once the right technology is realized, perfected and marketed. Further research is urgently needed on how best to generate, store and transmit solar-generated electricity. Second, we boast faculty with formidable talents in the core sciences so fundamental to critical solar research; areas such as optical sciences, astronomy, chemistry, physics and materials science. The three most visible professors studying solar technologies this year — Angel, Armstrong, and material sciences professor and AZRISE Director Joe Simmons — have more than 120 years of teaching and research experience among them, with 75 of those years spent right here at the UA. In fact, the College of Optical Sciences, one of three such colleges in the nation, is housed in the Meinel Building, which is named after Aden Meinel, who founded Optical Sciences and Kitt Peak National Observatory, built up Steward Observatory, and was a national leader in solar energy in the 1970s. Research foundation Clearly, while advances in solar technology are coming in rapid-fire succession at the UA, they did not happen overnight, or by happenstance. This expertise lies in our institutional DNA. It is something we have been cultivating — through our faculty and such world-class facilities as the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab — for decades. This is the sort of expertise we need to turn back global climate change, which President Obama has rightly characterized as the central threat of our time. He was wise to direct stimulus funds toward solving this problem, and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu was just as wise to invest significant portions of that funding in America's research universities, not only its national labs. After all, the billions of tons of greenhouse gases we are pumping into Earth's atmosphere represent a central threat to humanity that inspires the vision we are pursuing through our research and teaching relative to environmental sustainability. Priorities, but no roadmap When I came to the UA in 2006, with economic storm clouds already on the horizon, I clarified our priorities, which remain in effect: The UA will become one of America's 10 best public research universities, in part by leveraging our existing regional advantages in ways that benefit Arizonans as much as anyone. What I have carefully avoided doing is pre-ordaining a politically fashionable research "roadmap" of expected outcomes. I know from personal experience that innovation comes when administrators stay out of the way and let science run its course. After all, when UA astronomer A.E. Douglass began studying tree rings in the early 1900s to investigate whether sunspots influenced Earth's weather patterns, he wasn't trying to invent dendrochronology, the science that would one day be key to understanding climate change and fire ecology. Such are the rewards of pursuing the mysteries of science. And that is exactly what we are doing today at the UA, because the best science occurs when our faculty allow themselves to be guided by facts and observations, and let the results astound us all. This approach is working. Our professors and students are making great strides in tackling the barriers of cost, reliability, efficiency, storage and transmission of solar-generated electricity. Case in point: UA engineering students are building newer and bigger solar-electric cars for national competitions, and the UA is one of only 20 universities invited to design and build an energy-efficient solar-powered house on the Capitol Mall in Washington later this summer for a national competition. UA's advances in solar technologies come from the unique learning environment that characterizes our institution: The place where leading-edge research across many disciplines is brought directly to the student experience and shared with the public. UA takes its renewable intellectual energy to power tomorrow's solutions. Contact Robert N. Shelton through the Web site www.president.arizona.edu

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