US DOE to fund four projects to reduce solar power costs

• 11 years ago (2012-12-08)
• David Flin

North America 998 Renewables 752

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The US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that it will give $29 million to four projects to reduce the costs of installing solar panels and help utilities figure out how to manage the growing amount of solar electricity that flows into the grids. The funding is part of an initiative called SunShot, which was launched in early 2011 to make solar electricity cheap to produce and therefore competitive against energy from coal or natural gas power plants. The goal is to cut the production costs of large-scale solar projects to $0.06 per kWh by 2020.

The DOE plans to give $21 million over five years to two projects that will create “plug-and-play” solar energy producing equipment. The idea is to make it simpler and cheaper for homeowners to buy, install and bring online a system of solar panels to the grid in one day.

The North Carolina State University will work on standardising the designs of the components and the overall solar energy system for a domestic rooftop.

The Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems in Massachusetts will work on designing cabling that will make it easier to connect the solar panels to a smart meter and the grid. Fraunhofer will also design a system to allow the solar energy equipment to check itself for proper installation and to send its power generation data to the local utility.

The DOE will provide $8 million to two projects that will create better tools for predicting the amount, timing, and location of electricity generation from solar power plants. Currently, there are ways for solar power plant owners to project how much electricity their power plants might generate year after year. But some of the methods are not sophisticated or are not proven, particularly since the USA does not have many solar power plants that have been operating for decades.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Colorado will research the impact of clouds on solar energy generation and design short-term forecasting techniques.

The IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center in New York state will use a supercomputer to analyse various forecasting methods and determine the best ways to predict solar energy production.