Staff Reports, Merced Sun Star

UC Merced professor David Kelley has received a $1.3 million grant for research to make solar energy technology less costly.

Kelley will use the three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to improve a device called a luminescent solar concentrator.

The concentrator works by absorbing sunlight across a wide area and then re-emitting it onto a small photovoltaic cell.

Kelley, along with professors Valerie Leppert and Boaz Ilan, will attempt to develop new kinds of the concentrator, based on nanotechnology.

The goal is to reduce the cost of the process and make it more widely available as an energy source.

Kelley and Ilan are both members of the UC Merced Energy Research Institute, a group that develops and improves sustainable energy processes.