The Electric Power Research Institute was selected has secured a $10.7M research and development funding from the Department of Energy to accelerate solar energy generation and integration and lower solar electricity costs.
EPRI said Monday a large portion of the funding will be used to develop and validate high-fidelity models of photovoltaic facilities for use in planning, operating and securing transmission and distribution of solar energy systems and technologies.Â
DOE also tapped the nonprofit organization to demonstrate aggregation and control systems to boost grid services, help solar facilities identify underperformance and increase productivity, create machine learning and vision models for monitoring purposes as well as evaluate PV plant design innovations to reduce costs.
“Considered as a group, these projects bring advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence, and traditional field-based research to inform the deployment of advanced solar generation to support grid reliability and resilience,” said Arshad Mansoor, senior vice president for research and development at EPRI.Â
DOE announced in November that it will select 75 research projects to receive a total of $128M in funding to advance solar technologies.Â