DOE grants aim to reduce inverter costs and advance photovoltaic fire prevention technology – pv magazine USA

Nine projects won grants totaling $ 14 million from a Department of Energy program to boost the solar manufacturing industry in the United States.

Several of the projects aim to reduce the material costs of PV modules or PV shelving, or lower fault rates on module assembly lines. Lower cost inverters, photovoltaic fire prevention technology wins DOE grants Another aims to prevent installed systems from catching fire. Other projects are developing large scale photovoltaic inverters that would eliminate the need for a transformer.

The DOE also awarded $ 25 million to a public-private consortium to advance grid-forming inverters, which allow solar and other inverter-based technologies to restart the grid without a spinning turbine in a production unit at fossil fuel. The inverters forming the grid will enable a grid with a high renewable energy content with little or no fossil production.

Further grants of $ 6 million are aimed at providing better data to utilities on rooftop solar power generation.

Here are descriptions of the nine solar power manufacturing projects supported by DOE grants:

Lower cost inverters

• Develop and commercialize a 1 MW inverter for large scale photovoltaics that eliminates the need for a transformer, accepting 1000 volts of direct current and generating electricity directly on a 13 kV medium voltage AC grid (Imagen Energy, Milwaukee, Wisconsin).
• Upgrade and test a solar plus storage inverter for large scale PV that can send DC solar power to an energy storage device, or convert it to medium voltage AC, eliminating the need for a transformer ( Toshiba and UT Austin, Houston).
• Design, build, test and validate a 400 kWh inverter system for the commercial and industrial photovoltaic market, which has four hours of energy storage and an inverter forming the grid that can operate as stand-alone behind the meter ( GE Research and partners, Niskayuna, New Yord).

Fire prevention

• Produce a PV electrical connector that predicts and prevents arc faults in a PV system, which can cause electrical fires, and disconnects the system in less than two seconds (Management Sciences and Partners, Albuquerque, New Mexico).

Reduced manufacturing costs

• Eliminate the risks of screen-printing copper-based metallization paste, for electrical connections within and between solar cells at a lower cost than silver paste, and demonstrate its ease of manufacture (Bert Thin Films, Louisville, Kentucky ).
• In a photovoltaic module assembly line, integrate a non-contact inspection tool developed by Tau Science to identify electrical and mechanical faults before cell-to-cell interconnection, thus increasing the efficiency of modules ready to be shipped (Silfab Solar , Bellingham, Washington).
• Develop a new shelving system for floating photovoltaic systems and advance the manufacturing process to increase throughput (Accusolar and Nhu Energy, Tallahassee, FL).
• Develop high speed manufacturing of low cost electrically conductive aluminum backsheets for silicon PV modules, to replace copper backsheets on which electrical connections are printed (Silfab Solar and SunFlex Solar, Bellingham, Washington) .

Solar process heat

• Test and demonstrate the use of solar process heat instead of natural gas to dry municipal sewage sludge and produce fertilizers (Solar Dynamics, Broomfield, Colorado).

The Department of Energy describes in more detail all funded projects here.