Professor Andrew Blakers FTSE FAA (ACT) has been recognised for his contribution to the world’s energy transition, named the winner of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) Clunies Ross Technology Innovation Award.
Currently an Australian National University (ANU) Professor of Engineering, Blakers helped develop the passivated emitter and rear contact (PERC) solar cells which make up half of all solar cells world-wide and are mitigating an estimated 2% of global greenhouse emissions.
He also created a global atlas of about one million possible sites for off-river pumped hydro energy storage with the potential to power about one trillion electric vehicle batteries.
“I’ve been working in the area of solar energy and renewable energy since 1979 and I thought then that solar energy would in the end be the major source of energy for the world and this is turned out to be true,” Blakers said.
“There’s been continuous rapid exponential growth for 40 or 50 years and our solar is the dominant form of new generation capacity.”
Blakers said that it has been shown very large scale and rapid deployment to solar and wind does not lead to technical problems but instead to very low cost, very stable electricity systems.
“When we electrify transport, heating and industry we can readily get rid of all fossil fuels over the next 15 years,” he said.
During completion of a PhD at the University of New South Wales (NSW) he worked on high efficiency crystalline silicon solar cells and by the time the team had finished efficiency had been pushed up to 25%.
“The PERC cell design is now in about half all the solar panels ever made. Solar solves energy forever,” he said.
PERC solar panel sales to date are approximately $223 billion (USD 150 billion).
Blakers and his colleague’s work on the PERC solar cell technology was awarded the top global engineering Queen Elizabeth Prize in 2023, and he is co-inventor of Sliver solar cell technology and, in 1991, founded the ANU solar cell research group.
Another ATSE award winner contributing to the energy transition was the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) industrial chemist Professor Sara Couperthwaite for her research in transforming the sustainability of mineral processing and secure critical minerals to power the renewable energy transition.
Couperthwaite leads a team that achieved a breakthrough in the production of high purity alumina (HPA), a material that improves the performance and safety of lithium-ion batteries.
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