PV Powered wins stage 3 SEGIS contract

FORT COLLINS, USA: Advanced Energy Industries Inc. announced that PV Powered Inc., an Advanced Energy company, has been selected to continue development work funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Program (SETP) and administered by Sandia National Laboratories.

The effort is focused on lowering the barriers to adoption of solar energy on the utility grids of North America. Stage 3 represents the final stage of the competitive portion of the SEGIS program and is focused on commercialization of the technologies developed under previous stages.

Key development targets for this program include commercialization of new algorithms to optimize the energy harvest of the inverter and PV system, advanced communications technologies that enable distributed PV systems to communicate with power utilities, and next-generation controls functionality that will allow utilities to manage networks of distributed power sources.

The SEGIS program was chartered in 2008 by the US Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Solar Energy Technologies Program (SETP) focused on developing technologies that make solar power cost-competitive with traditional generation sources.

A key aspect of this work is developing advanced functionality for utility system integration. Leveraging a collaborative approach, PV Powered assembled an industry team of experts comprised of Schweizer Engineering Laboratories, Portland General Electric, Northern Plains Power Technologies, and Sensus to address the barriers to widespread adoption of PV.

“The Stage 3 award represents validation that PV Powered is on track with delivering solutions aligned with the DOE’s fundamental objective of enabling high-penetration PV,” said Steve Hummel, VP Engineering at PV Powered. “This proactive program has catalyzed key partnerships that are critical to solving some of the biggest problems that utilities experience today with renewable energy, so that we can deliver on the enormous promise of solar power.”

“Our SEGIS developments have been extremely well received by our utility partners and customers,” said Dr. Hans Betz, CEO of Advanced Energy. “This program demonstrates once again that Advanced Energy and PV Powered are the innovation leaders in this industry.”