The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory system is an integral resource for the Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) to invest in innovative research and development that will enable solar to increase its contribution to the reliability and resilience of the nation’s electricity grid and continue to drive down costs, while also developing next-generation solar technologies and boosting U.S. solar manufacturing.
The SETO Lab Call FY2022-24 funding program supports core capabilities at the national labs as well as research and development projects that aim to fill gaps, introduce new areas of investigation, and address specific questions to help SETO achieve its goals.
Approach
This funding program supports innovative projects that will have a measurable and significant impact on the equitable transition to a decarbonized electricity system by 2035 and decarbonized energy sector by 2050. These projects aim to advance new and emerging solutions, develop publicly accessible data and information assets, enhance knowledge through analysis and institutional support across stakeholder communities, engage in partnerships, foster user communities, and support U.S. manufacturing, commercialization, and technology transfer efforts.
Objectives
Projects are distributed across four major areas:
- Systems Integration – Modeling and simulating transient and dynamic behaviors of various elements of the electric power grid, including loads and distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) generation.
- Photovoltaics – Improving performance, reliability, and value of PV systems and balance-of-system components, as well as advancing characterization, monitoring, and data analysis for PV cells, modules, and systems.
- Soft Costs – Examining innovative strategies to reduce land-use conflicts, expedite installation, and reduce land costs for solar energy, as well as addressing needs related to datasets, analysis, tools, and models to improve and facilitate soft cost reductions.
- Concentrating Solar-Thermal Power (CSP) – Supporting CSP system and subsystem innovations to improve reliability or develop applications for solar-thermal energy, and creating a consortium for the research and development of heliostats.
Learn more about the Solar Energy Technologies Office’s national laboratory research and funding programs.