North Carolina University received $40 for its solar fuel research that is part of a larger $100 effort. The university is working with other institutions, including Yale and Emory. | Stock Photo
North Carolina University received $40 for its solar fuel research that is part of a larger $100 effort. The university is working with other institutions, including Yale and Emory. | Stock Photo
The U.S. Department of Energy is providing the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $40 million in funding to develop hybrid photoelectrodes through the CHASE program.
The development of hybrid photoelectrodes will be used to produce fuel to combine with semiconductors, the University of North Carolina said in a news release on Aug. 3. The semiconductors will then be used to absorb light that contains molecular catalysts for fuel production.
The funds are part of a $100 million award for the project. The $40 million will go to the UNC center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels, also known as CHASE.
Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Emory University, North Carolina State University, the University of Pennsylvania, UNC-Chapel Hill and Yale University are partnered with CHASE for the project.
“We have assembled a very strong team to set brand–new directions in this field,” Gerald Meyer, director of the CHASE Hub, said in the news release. “Our focus is to use the sun’s energy to directly generate storable liquid fuels.”
The funding will help the CHASE partnership project develop new ways to store solar energy, which can be used for solar fuels.
“With this support, CHASE will build on a strong foundation of solar energy research here at UNC and establish critical new partnerships that will enable the transformative scientific advances needed to realize liquid solar fuels,” Jillian Dempsey, deputy director of the CHASE Hub, said in the news release.
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