The cross-cutting theme of sustainability provides strategic guidance to each of the research themes as well as assists in integrating research, education, and innovation activities. The long-term vision for the project is to develop robust methods of anticipatory sustainability analysis and apply them to the PV sector in anticipation of rapid acceleration to terawatt-scale PV electricity generation. This entails addressing social, economic, and environmental sustainability. The social sustainability team is performing field research on the social sustainability of utility-scale and distributed PV developments in Arizona and elsewhere, as well as developing a theoretical model of complex socio-energy systems change, especially as it applies to terawatt-scale PV. The economic sustainability team is evaluating the economic and environmental benefits of grid-integrated storage systems for wider utilization of PV technology, assessing the effectiveness of public R&D funding programs for solar PV technology, and estimating the short-term costs and long-term benefits of federal and state market-based solar policies. Finally, the environmental sustainability team is completing a greenhouse gas impact analysis with application to PV policies, and applying an anticipatory life cycle analysis model to PV technology.
Research Faculty: Clark Miller (ASU), Wesley Herche (ASU), Christiana Honsberg (ASU), Stuart Bowden (ASU), Lado Kurdgelashvili (UD), Jason O’Leary (ASU), Fan Yang (ASU), Byrne (ASU), Thomas Seager (ASU).
