The Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative is hosting the “Hit Me with Your SunShot” photo contest with up to $2,500 in cash prizes, including a $500 grand prize. This new photo contest wants to see how solar energy is being used and is asking Americans across the country to submit solar photos in neighborhoods and in [...]
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently released On the Path to SunShot, a series of eight reports that takes stock of progress made halfway into the ten-year SunShot Initiative and highlights remaining opportunities for and barriers to achieving cost reductions by 2020. DOE originally launched the SunShot Initiative in 2011 to drive down the [...]
At its National Solar Thermal Test Facility, Sandia National Laboratories recently completed a 3½-year project funded by DOE’s SunShot Initiative to develop a high-temperature falling particle receiver, in which sand-like ceramic particles are heated as they fall through a beam of highly concentrated sunlight focused by an array of mirrors. The falling-particle receiver enables concentrated [...]
As reported on the PV Performance Modeling Collaborative (PVPMC), Sandia Labs is leading a three-year research project to study bifacial photovoltaic technology and performance. The project is sponsored by SunShot, a U.S. Department of Energy program. Conventional PV cells convert light hitting the front side of the cell to electricity. With a few extra processing steps, [...]
Sandia has developed a software toolkit that uses stochastic programming to perform power system production cost model simulations. Named PRESCIENT, the software produces probabilistic forecasts automatically from deterministic historical forecasts for load, solar, and/or wind power production and their respective actuals, using a technology known as epi-splines. An example of a probablistic solar forecast [...]
Jeff Koplow has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Innovator in Residence Fellowship by the SunShot Initiative, a Department of Energy (DOE) enterprise to make solar energy fully cost-competitive with traditional energy sources by 2020. Jeff and his team will apply a multidisciplinary problem solving approach that they have successfully applied to many [...]
With recently awarded funding from the US Department of Energy SunShot Initiative’s CSP: APOLLO Program (Concentrating Solar Power: Advanced Projects Offering Low LCOE Opportunities), Sandia is working with a team led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison to evaluate the potential for significant improvements in the commercial viability of supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2)/Brayton-cycle power conversion as [...]
Stion PV system installed and the Sandia RTC site. Thin-film solar module manufacturer Stion has commissioned a 12 kW fixed latitude ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) system at the DOE’s New Mexico Regional Test Center (RTC), located at Sandia. The system will be monitored and tested to collect a range of data related to the [...]
A residential distributed energy-storage unit being installed (top) and inspected (bottom). Researchers from Sandia will give a plenary talk on energy storage test protocols at the European PV Solar Energy Conference (EU PVSEC), to be held in September in Hamburg, Germany. Plenary presentations are given to the entire conference and reserved for outstanding [...]
A roof structure is made stronger by the system elements working together—much stronger than its main load-bearing element, the rafter, is alone. Current engineering analysis methods do not take this composite action into account when evaluating rooftop strength. Two Sandia research reports, “Structural Code Considerations of Solar Rooftop Installations” and “Empirically Derived Strength [...]
