The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced funding of up to $130 million for new research to advance early-stage solar technologies.
This funding program targets five research areas: photovoltaics (PV), concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP), soft costs reduction, innovations in manufacturing, and solar systems integration. These projects will aim to make solar energy more affordable, reliable, and secure, while working to boost domestic solar manufacturing, reduce red tape, and make PV more resilient to cyberattack.
This topic will support several applied research collaborations to tackle key challenges in commercially available technologies and invest in new materials that can lower the cost of PV-generated electricity. It will look at system-level opportunities that can increase the amount of energy produced by a PV array over its lifetime and lower the costs of manufacturing and deploying solar systems. In addition, it will fund several high-risk, early-stage projects to seed new ideas for continued research. One of the areas of interest is perovskite module manufacturing and long-term durability.
Other PV-related areas of interest iin this financing scheme can be found on the DoE website.
