SunShot invests $2.2m in three solar start-ups

Share

The CelLink Corporation start-up company, based in Belmont, is one of three California small businesses to benefit from U.S. Energy Department grants in the latest round of the department's SunShot Incubator program.

CelLink has secured $704,000 of support to develop a circuit it claims can reduce the cost of producing high-efficiency solar panels by 10% through savings on material costs.

The award is part of a $2.2 million handout from the Incubator in round eight of the program with Berkley-based SolarNexus Inc securing almost $497,000 to develop the first set of apps available to enable disparate types of software used by solar contractors to communicate, reducing labor and customer acquisition costs for solar installers.

San Francisco-based Grenability has been awarded $1 million to develop a comparison report that will enable customers to find the best solar payment plan by comparing predicted with actual annual savings and producing a monthly savings statement. The company is also working on a ‘verified by Genability' certification to help solar installers with bid preparation costs.

The SunShot campaign, which aims to reduce the cost of solar to $0.06/W, claims it has already reduced the cost of utility scale PV in the U.S. to $0.11/W, a figure below the average $0.12/W cost of electricity in the country, according to Energy Information Administration figures.

The Energy Department, which announced the latest cash awards on Monday, says the Incubator program has leveraged $1.8 billion in private sector funding for more than 75 start-ups and small businesses since 2007, with $18 of private money generated for every dollar of public money spent.

Popular content

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.

Share

Related content

Elsewhere on pv magazine...

Leave a Reply

Please be mindful of our community standards.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

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.