The US Department of Energy (DOE) has invited applications from early-career researchers exploring solar PV and concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) ideas that are riskier than research ideas based on established technologies. The call has been launched under the Small Innovative Projects in Solar (SIPS) 2024 funding opportunity. 

The Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) is looking for seedling R&D projects that focus on innovative and novel ideas in the said technologies. Eligibility to be considered includes never having applied or been selected for a SETO project award. 

To win SIPS 2024 funding, research work should focus on new and emerging areas of PV research that can produce significant results within the 1st year of performance. If these are successful, should lay the foundation for continued research. 

Such projects should aim to significantly lower costs and improve the power conversion efficiency, fielded energy output, reuse and recycling of system components, service lifetime and manufacturability of PV technologies. 

SETO expects to select 7 to 12 winning projects to award $250,000 each for PV technology. A similar number of projects are likely to win $400,000 each for the CSP topic. 

The department said this funding round is aimed at accelerating innovative R&D projects towards large-scale development and deployment of solar technologies to support an equitable transition to a decarbonized electricity system by 2035, and decarbonized energy sector by 2050.  

The funding opportunity was announced on January 18, 2024. It states March 6, 2024 as the last date to submit full applications. Winning projects will be awarded in Summer 2024. The details are available on Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE) website. 

Winners of SIPS 2023 funding 

The DOE also announced the winning projects of the SIPS 2023 funding round, selecting 24 projects to award a total of $7.8 million, comprising 9 each for CSP and PV technologies. 

Next-generation perovskite solar technology seems to be a popular subject of research for several winners of this round. One of the winners, Colorado School of Mines, is exploring low-temperature printing for next-generation perovskite tandem solar cells with little to no silver content. 

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has won for its 2 projects. The first is the development of lower cost, higher efficiency silicon boules via a combined chemical vapor deposition float zone process to produce higher efficiency wafers. The other project aims to quantify the impact of PV system repowering and module reuse on PV project economics, sustainability and equity. 

The University of California, Davis has been selected to research on mitigating the performance degradation of silicon TOPCon cells by analyzing their structural and electronic dynamics from femtoseconds to gigaseconds. 

A list of winning projects of SIPS 2023 funding are available on the DOE’s website.