$26M Investment In RE Grid Demonstration Projects By Biden Administration

US President Joe Biden has announced a US $26M investment to demonstrate that the US electricity grid can be run fully on renewables and energy storage.

The program will investigate how renewable energy can sustain grid dependability and allow it to stay connected during disturbances or reboot it in the event of a shutdown through the US Department of Energy (DOE).

Because the grid was originally designed to provide power from fossil fuel facilities, the advent of renewable energy on a large scale has necessitated the testing of new technologies for managing an increasingly complicated network.

Jennifer Granholm, US Secretary of Energy thanked the Biden Administration and said, “DOE is proving that transitioning to solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources can keep the lights on without service interruptions while creating good paying jobs.”

The program will fund up to ten projects that demonstrate how solar PV plants, wind turbines, and energy storage with a capacity mix of at least 10MW can support the power system by automatically responding to different demands and disturbances, averting blackouts, and reducing energy consumption.

In addition, the DOE has established a Cadmium Telluride Accelerator Consortium with a US$20 million budget to reduce the cost of cadmium telluride (CdTe), enhance its efficiency, and find new markets for solar cell products. CdTe is the primary material for thin-film solar production championed by First Solar of the United States.

First Solar, the University of Toledo in Ohio, Colorado State University, CdTe module producer Toledo Solar, and Sivananthan Laboratories will lead the partnership.

This announcement comes shortly after the DOE-funded US$56 million for solar manufacturing support, with one of the schemes focusing exclusively on CdTe.

Furthermore, the consortium has a broad research agenda that includes CdTe doping techniques, the characterization, and exploration of new CdTe contacting materials, and work to enable a bifacial CdTe module.

The Biden administration has been investing in various projects through the DOE in recent weeks, despite senator Joe Manchin’s refusal to embrace the Build Back Better Act.

Late this week, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin accepted an agreement with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which will include $369 billion in energy security and climate change programs over the next decade and is expected to increase domestic PV production.