UNSW scientist Martin Green beats Elon Musk to a top award

UNSW’s star solar energy researcher Martin Green has beaten Elon Musk to win the 2018 Global Energy Prize.

Professor Martin Green, UNSW solar researcher

UNSW’s star solar energy researcher Martin Green has beaten Elon Musk to take out a prestigious and lucrative world science award, the 2018 Global Energy Prize.

Professor Green, whose research led to the highly efficient solar power cells that are commercially available today will share the award and its $820,000 prizemoney with Russian scientist Sergey Alekseenko, an expert in thermal power engineering.

Tesla founder and rechargeable battery pioneer Elon Musk was on the shortlist of 10 for the prize, nominated for the impact his Tesla electric car and his energy storage batteries are having on global warming and carbon dioxide reduction.

The Global Energy Prize, which has been awarded annually since 2003, is rated as one of the world’s 99 major science awards by IREG, the body which ranks science prizes. Established by the Global Energy Association, it is judged by an independent international panel of experts and considered to be worth 0.48 of a Nobel prize.

Unusually, it is sponsored by Russian energy companies and Professor Green will be presented with his prize in October this year by Russian President Vladimir Putin, or possibly his nominee.

The Global Energy Association said Professor Green was recognised for his “research, development and educational activities in the field of photovoltaics that have led to significant cost reduction combined with the output power increase and allowed deployment of the appropriate systems”.

Professor Green, director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics at UNSW, is the inventor of the PERC solar cell, which accounts for at least a quarter of world solar cell manufacturing capacity and whose market share is rapidly increasing because it has an efficiency advantage on other types of cells.

“It’s much cheaper to generate electricity from solar cells now than from coal-fired power stations,” Professor Green said.

He said his research is now focused on making solar cells more efficient using new technology to harness more of the energy available at the blue end of the light spectrum.

Professor Green said the cost of solar cells had fallen by a factor of 10 over 10 years and he was excited by what would come next.

“The amazing thing is that they will become even cheaper,” he said. “It used to be said that nuclear power would be ‘too cheap to measure’. That was never true of nuclear but will be of solar.”