DOE invests $52M into solar supply chain, $30M to help integrate solar energy
The Biden administration announced this week a total of $82 million to be invested by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) into domestic solar manufacturing, recycling, and solar integration into the grid.
“President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is fueling a clean energy revolution right here at home with game-changing incentives for manufacturing and deployment,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said. “DOE is seizing that momentum by making some of our largest ever investments in research to strengthen our domestic solar supply chain—creating good-paying jobs and boosting economic opportunities in communities across America in the process.”
In all, $52 million will be distributed across 19 selected projects to strengthen the domestic solar supply chain, while $30 million will go to technologies for integrating solar energy. These efforts will span research, development, and demonstration to aid American manufacturing, create American-made solar technologies, promote cheaper and more efficient solar cells, and recycle solar panels. Diversification will be a key push therein, in what the White House hoped would push private sector domestic solar manufacturing even well beyond the more than $5 billion invested since 2020.
Currently, these efforts are on track to increase domestic solar panel manufacturing capacity, perhaps as much as 8-fold, by the end of 2024.
The newly announced funding can be broken down into a few areas: improving panel recycling, domestic solar manufacturing improvement, and grid management. Of the awarded projects this week, eight were for panel recycling, ranging from universities to corporate efforts. Some, like an effort by Solarcycle, Inc., will focus on recovering key materials from solar panels at the end of their life, while other efforts, like those by the Georgia Institute of Technology, seek to replace solar in solar cell electrical contacts with new copper and aluminum-based metal pastes, among other projects.
At the same time, approximately $16 million in awards will go to two Ohio-based projects under the Solar Manufacturing Incubator program. Both efforts, one from First Solar and another from Toledo Solar, will advance the commercialization of new product ideas for the U.S. solar supply chain, focusing on cadmium telluride (CdTe)-based modules and panels. A further $18 million will benefit two projects under the PV Research and Development funding program, one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another from the University of Colorado Boulder. Their efforts will unite researchers on efficiency efforts for module designs and solar cells to make commercially relevant manufacturing methods.
Another seven projects will push for risk reduction among new technologies and manufacturing processes and push solutions closer to prototyping. Awardees ranged from BREK Electronics of Broomfield, Colo., to Vitro Flat Glass of Cheswick, Pa., with projects including developing new inverter technologies and improving the power output of CdTe modules with high-performance glass for solar modules.
The final $30 million will be an Operation and Planning Tools for Inverter-based resource Management and Availability in Future Power (OPTIMA) funding opportunity. Funds will be doled out to fight emerging challenges for grid planning operators and engineers dealing with all the new items integrating onto the grid while maintaining its daily reliable operation.
