On October 21, Sandia’s Joshua Stein, Melissa Sisneros, and Bruce King (all in the Photovoltaic & Distributed Systems Integration Dept.) will host a workshop on demonstrating strategies for defining the bankability of new PV products, “Driving the Commercialization of New Solar Technologies: What You Can Learn with the U.S. DOE Regional Test Centers toward Demonstrating [...]
The HelioVolt PV array installed at the Sandia RTC site. (Photo credit: Charles Robinson) HelioVolt, Sandia National Laboratories, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Florida Solar Energy Center are pleased to announce the successful grid connection of the first half of six arrays to be deployed at the U.S. Department of Energy Regional [...]
Glare viewed from the air traffic control tower at Manchester/Boston Regional Airport. (April 27, 2012, at 8:15 a.m.) Sandia researchers—competing in an international pool of universities, corporations, and government labs—captured three R&D100 Awards in this year’s contest. R&D Magazine presents the awards each year to researchers whom its editors and independent judging panels [...]
Matthew Lave is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Matthew’s research focuses on variability analysis of solar radiation and solar power. His Ph.D. thesis is exploring upscaling and downscaling solar radiation time series using wavelets. Sandians Mathew Lave and Joshua Stein ( both in the Photovoltaics and Distributed [...]
Jim Pacheco built a reputation in concentrating solar power and was recruited by several companies when the technology took off in the marketplace. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Jim Pacheco (now in the Active Response and Denial Dept.) received an Entrepreneurial Spirit Award for his participation in Sandia's Entrepreneurial Separation to Transfer Technology (ESTT) [...]
Standard steps in modeling PV plant performance (from the PV Performance Modeling Collaborative). The wide variety of PV system technologies and designs, site conditions, and operations strategies means that complex PV system performance models are needed to represent PV plant performance. While PV component and system costs are rapidly falling, the upfront costs [...]
The PV Performance Modeling Collaborative (PVPMC) recently released version 1.1 of the PV_LIB Toolbox for Matlab. The new version includes important bug fixes and many new and useful functions, including support for the single diode module model, clear sky irradiance models, incident angle modifier models and more! Sandia facilitates the PVPMC, a group of over [...]
The Distributed Energy Technologies Laboratory (DETL) at Sandia National Laboratories. A report released recently by Sandia National Laboratories, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and the Georgia Institute of Technology provides a unique approach to help utilities assess the potential effects of high levels of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems on the grid. “Time [...]
A recently released Sandia National Laboratories report, "Suggested Guidelines for Assessment of DG Unintentional Islanding Risk," outlines a procedure to help utility distribution engineers determine the risk of unintentional islanding in distributed energy generation installations. By providing a quick and reliable way to identify situations in which such risk is negligible, Sandia’s approach can help [...]
Sandia has developed a significantly cheaper, more efficient, and more accurate method of measuring the irradiance from solar reflections using a digital camera. Measurements of reflected solar irradiance is of great importance to industry, military, and government agencies to assess potential impacts of glint and glare from growing numbers of solar power installations around the [...]
