The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that Sandia National Laboratories is investing $8.5 million for four projects that have reached Stage III of the Solar Energy Grid Integration Systems (SEGIS) program. These investments will be matched more than one-to-one by the SEGIS contractors to support more than $20 million in total projects. The selections are part of the Department’s ongoing work to improve the Nation’s electrical grid reliability as solar energy technologies reach cost-competitiveness with conventional sources of electricity and increasing amounts of photovoltaic (PV) solar electricity flow into the Nation’s electrical grid.
Initiated in 2008, the SEGIS program is a partnership that includes DOE, Sandia National Laboratories, industry, utilities and universities. Under the program, projects are emphasizing complete system development for solar technologies, for instance, how to move designs of intelligent system controls towards commercialization and how best to integrate expanded solar resources onto the grid while maintaining or improving power quality and reliability. The awards are follow-on selections from the first two stages of the SEGIS program. Projects were selected based on the highest likelihood of commercialization of reliable products that will best enable and accelerate the integration of solar PV technologies into an intelligent electrical grid.
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