Sunlight to Everything
Mission
Supporting science and engineering to make materials and build systems that harness sunlight while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, waste, and facilitating carbon drawdown.
Overview
Sunlight is an inexhaustible resource. Harnessing its power could drive a circular economy to generate energy, reduce carbon emissions, reduce materials waste, and eventually to generate the negative carbon emissions needed to bring our warming planet back into balance. Through this initiative, research focuses on addressing the challenge of generating all of our society's resource needs from sunlight, including electricity, fuels, chemicals, materials and fertilizers. It addresses the challenges in the coming transformation of everything we make and do, as well as the creation a robust solar-powered energy infrastructure for a secure future.
Important Questions
- How do we increase the efficiency for solar energy conversion, using more of the solar spectrum?
- How do we produce cheap and energy-efficient fuels, chemicals and fertilizers using sunlight?
- How do we leap forward with electricity storage and efficient electrical grids, enabling renewable baseload electricity?
- How do we capture, convert and sequester carbon dioxide using solar-driven processes?
- How can information and machine learning be used to accelerate discovery of new materials and molecules for energy technology applications?
- How can scalable space-based solar power systems be designed to supply energy for the Earth?
- Sunlight-to-Everything Initiative Lead; Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry; William H. Hurt Scholar
Karthish Manthiram
Imagine if we could manufacture the physical world starting from carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water, and sunlight - the toolkit to make that happen is becoming a reality here at Caltech.