The U.S. Department of Energy gives out generous funding for solar technology research

The Solar Energy Technologies Office Fiscal Year 2018 (SETO FY2018) funding program addresses the affordability, flexibility, and performance of solar technologies. This program funds early-stage research projects that advance both solar photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) technologies.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would provide $53 million in funding for 53 projects in the SETO FY2018 funding program. Of those projects, 31 will focus on photovoltaics research and development. Within this topic, the office has also selected projects that will develop and test new ways to accelerate the integration of emerging technologies into the solar industry.

• The University of Texas at Dallas, which received $200,000 for their project titled: "Higher Throughput, Lower Cost Processing of Flexible Perovskite Solar Cells by Photonic Curing"
• Columbia University, which received $200,000 for their project titled: "Comparative Life-Cycle Analysis of Scalable Single-Junction and Tandem Perovskite Solar Cell Systems"
• Colorado School of Mines, which received $200,000 for their project titled: "Multi-Messenger In-situ Tolerance Optimization of Mixed Perovskite Photovoltaics"
• Princeton University, which received $1,500,000 for their project titled: "Identifying Impacts of Process, Precursors and Defects in Metal Halide Perovskite Solar Cells"
• Stanford University, which received $1,496,069 for their project titled: "Accelerated Scaling to Rapid Open-Air Fabrication of Durable Perovskite Solar Modules"
• University of Colorado Boulder, which received $1,499,764 for their project titled: "Mini-Modules Made with Monolithically Integrated All-Perovskite Tandems"
• University of Washington, which received $1,500,000 for their project titled: "Machine Learning Assisted Enhancement of Perovskite Stability and Performance"