Event Details

Solar photovoltaic microgrids for energy access and emissions mitigation

Professor Jenny Nelson

Jenny Nelson^1,2 , PhilSandwell¹, Hamish Beath², Javier Baranda Alonso¹,Ajay Gambhir²

¹ Department of Physics, Imperial College London

² Grantham Institute for Climate Change, ImperialCollege London

The UN’s sustainabledevelopment goal, SDG7, aims to provide universal access to affordable,reliable and modern energy services for all by 2030.However, around 840 millionpeople lack access to electricity and many others lack affordable or reliableenergy services, mainly in rural areas of developing countries. Renewableenergy resources such as solar power have the potential to address this aimwithout increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Solar photovoltaic microgrids aremodular, scaleable, available and increasingly affordable, and as a resultsolar electricity has been growing faster, as a fraction of nationalelectricity consumption in the developing world than elsewhere.

In designing low carbon solarenergy systems for energy access, we need to consider a number of issuesincluding, the optimum size and configuration of the system, how it is likelyto grow, how to balance the cost of electricity and associated emissions, andhow to balance the availability but relatively high capital cost of minigridswith national aspirations for extended grid access. We have developed a model[1] which we have applied to some of these questions. We will report on studiesof a variety of situations including community micro-grids, health centres andpower systems for humanitarian settings [2,3]. We will also discuss the role ofinnovative PV technologies in energy for development [4]

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/grantham-institute/public/publications/briefing-papers/Supporting-Rural-Electrification-in-Developing-Countries---CLOVER-Modelling-Minigrids.pdf

[2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solmat.2016.04.030

[3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2017.09.416

[4] https://doi.org/10.1039/C4EE03132F

The presenterJenny Nelson is a Professor of Physics atImperial College London, where she has researched novel varieties of materialfor use in solar cells since 1989. Her current research is focussed onunderstanding the properties of molecular and hybrid semiconductor materialsand their application to solar energy conversion. This work combinesfundamental electrical, spectroscopic and structural studies of molecularelectronic materials with numerical modelling and device studies, with the aimof optimising the performance of solar cells and other devices based onmolecular and hybrid materials. She also works with the Grantham Institute forClimate Change at Imperial to explore the mitigation potential of renewableenergy technologies. She is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in Materials Scienceand has published over 250 articles in peer reviewed journals, several bookchapters and a book on the physics of solar cells. She holds a number of awardsincluding the 2016 Institute of Physics Faraday medal and was elected as aFellow of the Royal Society in 2014.