The deployment of photovoltaic (PV) technologies ranging from large-scale solar power plants to building integration, such as roof-top and semi-transparent light-harvesting window modules, can address a major and growing segment of power requirement in several regions across the Globe. Harvesting solar energy is especially relevant to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and to the GCC countries, because of their unique exposure to sunlight all year round. In principle, the energy needs of the Middle East could be fulfilled by one single fuel – sunlight.

The KAUST Solar Future 2014 Meeting will take place on November 8-11, 2014, at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, and it will gather some of the main contributors in PV Research across the scientific community to focus on “Emerging PV”: a set of potentially low-cost and disruptive thin film PV technologies that could transform the landscape of solar energy conversion in the next 10-20 years.

The Meeting includes three days of invited presentations and poster sessions (Nov. 9-11), spanning the three major rapidly-emerging areas of “Polymer and Small-molecule Organic PV”, “Quantum Dot PV”, and “Perovskite PV”. The program of invited presentations – with Faculty contributions from Stanford University, Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, UC Santa Barbara, EPFL, University of Toronto, Princeton University, and other well-established hubs of PV and Flexible Electronics Research – has been composed over several overarching themes and challenges common to the three emerging areas of PV Research:

1. New Developments in Materials;
2. Processing, Microstructures and Morphologies;
3. Processes at Interfaces;
4. Device Engineering and Multijunction Solar Cells.

The two evening poster sessions organized by the KAUST / Materials Research Society (MRS) Student Chapter will be the opportunity for Students and Postdocs to extend their interactions with Faculty far beyond the program of overview presentations, and share their latest technical developments and breakthroughs in Emerging PV in a relaxed and stimulating environment.

The KAUST Solar Future 2014 Meeting is an event supported by the Solar and Photovoltaic Engineering Research Center (SPERC), and the Office of Competitive Research and Funds (OCRF) at KAUST.

Wei and Lina 

Our VPI Prof. Frechet 

Lina and Prof. Prashant V. Kamat

Lina and Prof. Michael Grätzel