Solectria Renewables, a U.S. based grid-tied photovoltaic inverter manufacturer, announced that it received a $2.1 million U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) contract for developing integrated smart-grid ready photovoltaic (PV) inverters. Its partners in this project will be the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Detroit Edison, National Grid and Xcel Energy.

The DOE supposedly contracted Solectria as part of its SunShot Initiative which accelerates the development of cost-competitive solar technologies. The DOE SunShot Initiative is a collaborative national initiative to make solar energy cost competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade and one of the main objectives is to restore U.S. leadership in the global clean energy race.

According to Solectria, the main elements in the project are: head-end communications at the utility operations center; integration into the Distribution Management System (DMS); back-end PV plant master controller; and smart-grid functionality built into the inverters.

Solectria claimed that its inverters boasts an industry leading 97.5 percent CEC weighted efficiency which translates into significantly greater energy generation per year for utility-scale PV systems. Under this contract, EPRI and Solectria Renewables will integrate the DMS using which utilities can efficiently communicate different operating objectives such as a normal mode, with no disturbances, energy conservation mode, demand reduction mode, or grid-level emergency mode. These features would help utilities evade operational problems and extra costs and at the same time bring down inverter maintenance.

Officials with Solectria commented that they are honored to have been selected by the Department of Energy to receive this award, which is a reaffirmation of their leadership in the inverter space. Enabling utilities to control their SMARTGRID inverters (SGI) is the next big step towards a smarter grid that can accommodate a very high PV penetration density in a safe, secure, efficient and reliable manner.

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