Bright Days for Solar

Continued from page 4

Gaining momentum
On May 3, 1978, President Jimmy Carter announced a new push to make solar power cheap enough to compete with electricity generated from fossil fuels. He said that goal could be reached by 1990. But within just a few years, investment in solar panels had waned, and solar research had fallen into Buonassisi's "dead period."

The researchers now exploring solar energy at MIT are picking up where the surge of research in the late 1970s and early '80s left off. Like Vladimir Bulovic's work on luminescent concentrators, Buonassisi's method for removing defects from crystalline silicon has its roots in the '70s: it was suggested by the research of Ali Argon, now an MIT professor emeritus who has advised ­Buonassisi. And Emanuel Sachs is one of MIT's solar torch-­bearers: his work in the early 1980s led to the founding of Evergreen Solar, the company that lured Buonassisi away from academia.

The difference is that this time around, the solar industry is orders of magnitude larger, Buonassisi says. "If you feel that scale and put your finger to that pulse, you start to have respect for the momentum that this industry has behind it now," he says. "It didn't have anything close to that in the 1970s."

So as the work at MIT expands, the idea of making solar power competitive with conventional sources of electricity in much of the United States looks increasingly feasible, even on Carter's ambitious 12-year time line. And that has researchers increasingly excited. "We have a $50 billion industry behind us," Buonassisi says. "There's large potential for anything we do in the laboratory. A little bit of innovation can have an enormous impact."