IPC, a team with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Virginia Tech, currently develops solar inverters for the U.S. commercial photovoltaic market. Its focus is on decreasing the weight of the inverter, thus helping to reduce costs.
Using the funds awarded by DOE, a spokesperson told pv magazine that the ARPA-E project will create a bidirectional silicon IGBT (insulated gate bipolar transistor), which will be optimized for IPCs product requirements.
"Uni-directional (non-bidirectional) silicon IGBTs are the mainstream power electronic switches used in solar inverters and other high power electronic converter applications. IPC patented current-modulation topology requires bidirectional switches, which are not needed in existing products," explained the spokesperson.
They said research will begin when the contract with DOE has been signed. "It will take several years to develop and commercialize the new IGBTs," they continued, adding that "IPC plans to use the new bidirectional silicon IGBTs in a next generation power converter for solar inverters and other applications."
Although new manufacturing facilities are expected to be established in the future, no concrete plans have been laid out thus far.
IPCs overall goal is to reduce the weight of its inverters by 98 percent, which will then help to lower the cost of materials, manufacturing, shipping and installation. "Due to the rapid decline in PV modules, the inverter and installation costs are becoming the bottleneck to further PV system cost reductions," said IPC in a separate statement released.
IPC said its first 30 kilowatt photovoltaic inverter weighed just 94 pounds. This reduction in weight from conventional inverters, which weigh 1,200 pounds, explained the statement, allows for simple shipment and wall mount savings of around 90 percent.
"The IPC inverter is also more efficient at 97 percent CEC-weighted efficiency and is more reliable due to eliminating all electrolytic capacitors and other design improvements," it continued.
The 30 kilowatt inverters are said to be near to commercial availability now.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.