UCF's Solar Energy Center looks at PV

UCF's Florida Solar Energy Center in Cocoa will lead one of 12 teams selected to work with the U.S. Department of Energy on utilizing solar energy.

The DOE plans to invest $24 million toward the research and development of less expensive, higher performing photovoltaic systems, a technology used to convert sunlight into electricity.

As part of the Solar Energy Grid Integration Systems projects, SEGIS, a team from the Florida Solar Energy Center, along with 11 other teams across the country, will develop a competitive proposal for integrating photovoltaic systems, commonly known as solar systems, into the existing energy grid.

The focus of the SEGIS project is to make solar systems more resistant to disturbances and more useful to utilities companies so that the technology will behave in the same manner as conventional generators.

Bob Reedy, Solar Energy Research Director of the FSEC, said the burden of assimilation lies on the technology with the least seniority.

"We have to comply with our [solar] systems to their requirements on the utility." Reedy said. "We want these systems, these modern, state-of-the-art, solid-state systems, to behave like an 80-year-old steam turbine generator behaves when it's connected to the grid."

Making solar systems cost-competitive with existing building energy management systems is one of the primary goals of the FSEC's project.

"Making it very routine, very automatic, and very straight-forward to install," Reedy said. "Right now, the basic cost of the cell is less than half the total cost of the installation. That's a clue that we really need to work on what's called the 'balance of systems.' "

The cost of construction, shipping and design of solar systems have been tending to increase while the price of the solar cells themselves seem to be decreasing, Reedy said.

Reedy said solar cells are enjoying the opportunities for mass production, as more solar technology is supplied to the market, and demand slows enough to bring prices down for consumers. And cost is expected to continue falling, Reedy said.

Reedy compares the adoption of solar systems to the extent with which central air conditioning has been adopted in Florida.

"That's what we want to happen next," Reedy said. "When you build a building in Florida, you're going to put [solar cells] on the roof as well as solar hot water because that's the way buildings are built, and what will drive that will be grid parity."

Grid parity is the point at which solar power is equal to or cheaper than the conventional power provided by a utility company. Reedy expects grid parity some time around 2012.

According to the October 2007 SEGIS Concept Paper, a control system could be used with the solar system to: Monitor weather trends and solar availability via the Internet; optimize energy flow based on the current time of the day, day of the week and time of the year; and communicate with utility smart-metering services to obtain real-time pricing.

As grid parity approaches, the SEGIS projects expect to see huge deployments of solar systems driven by economic forces.

In that time it could be possible to see 15 to 20 percent of electricity on the grid generated by solar systems at times with the most sunlight.

Because of rising utility rates in the last few years, Reedy said it looks more and more economic to deploy solar systems directly into the utility grid.

Michael Brown, president of Solar-Ray Inc. in Orlando, has been installing solar systems for five years. "Exponential" is the word he used to describe the increase in customer demand for solar technology.

"Every single customer out there is going at it from the angle of reducing their electric bill," Brown said.

Some customers worry about the return on their investment, but Brown said the investment returns sooner than was once thought.

"It's an addition to the value of your house to the sum of what it costs to have it installed," Brown said. "If you install a $20,000 system on your house, it's worth $20,000 more than it would have been if it didn't have it."

Brown sees a cultural division occurring as the energy market shifts to reusing rather than just consuming energy.

"Everybody that's in the energy industry on the utility side is looking for a consumable form of electricity, something that they can charge you for every month … and they want that," Brown said. "Everything that we need to be energy independent, sustainable and to lower our utility costs over time to make our utilities more dependable and to help the environment and everything else, already exists."