The US Department of Energy (DOE) on Thursday announced an investment of USD 71 million (EUR 65.3m) in research, development and demonstration projects to advance the US solar supply chain.
Image by First Solar Inc.
The funding, which includes USD 16 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, has been allocated to 18 projects.
Ten of these are aimed at fostering solar innovation and include three that will seek to support the development of technologies for onshore silicon wafer and cell manufacturing, and seven looking to advance dual-use photovoltaic (PV) technologies, such as building-integrated PV and agrivoltaics.
The biggest award in this group is USD 11.2 million, intended to help Ubiquity Solar develop the Continuous Czochralski Method (CCz) method of manufacturing silicon ingots.
A further eight projects will try to advance US leadership in thin-film technologies such as cadmium telluride (CdTe) and perovskites tandems.
US thin-film solar module manufacturer First Solar Inc has secured two awards, USD 6 million for a project to design tandem perovskite and copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) PV modules and USD 15 million for a project to increase CdTe PV module efficiency.
DOE’s USD 71 million allocation was featured in yesterday’s White House announcement with actions to beef up US solar manufacturing.
(USD 1 = EUR 0.920)
