The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $5 million for the American-Made Solar Prize Round 5, a competition designed to accelerate the commercialization of products needed for widespread, equitable solar energy deployment and domestic manufacturing. DOE also announced a new tool that connects innovators with support from DOE’s national labs, business incubators and other entrepreneurial resources in the American-Made Network to advance their technologies.
“By fueling connections between the nation’s most creative and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, the 17 national labs and the broader DOE ecosystem, universities, and the private sector, we are catalyzing the best of American ingenuity and creating an innovation engine for America,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Kelly Speakes-Backman. “This is how America will decarbonize the energy sector and lead the $23 trillion global clean energy market.”
The new tool uses artificial intelligence to expand and develop the American-Made Network’s capabilities, helping fast-track development cycles. This tool will lower barriers to market entry for entrepreneurs by matching innovators to the exact resources they need, right when they need them.
American-Made Solar Prize Round 5
For the first time, the American-Made Solar Prize will have two tracks — one for hardware innovations and one for software innovations — a recognition that both are needed to advance the solar industry. The software track will have a particular focus on enabling underserved communities to overcome systemic barriers to solar energy. To further incentivize this focus, competitors can win $300,000 in additional funds through a Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Contest. The two tracks of the competition will focus on hardware and software components separately, with the goal of enabling more entrepreneurs to compete in the solar space.
The hardware track builds on the previous four rounds of the Solar Prize by soliciting ideas for hardware products that can be manufactured in America. Over the course of the previous four rounds, the Solar Prize supported 80 teams with $11 million in cash prizes and $3.4 million in technical support. The Solar Prize Round 5 hardware track will support as many as 20 new teams, who will compete for up to $3 million in prizes as they advance their technologies with the support of the American-Made Network.
In the software track, DOE seeks software concepts that will help address the non-hardware costs of solar, like customer acquisition, financing, and grid integration. Software track competitors can receive up to $2 million in prizes, using advances in communications and information technologies to rethink how to solve solar deployment challenges.
To augment Round 5 and the JEDI Contest, NREL is launching a Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee to help attract, recruit, and support a broader, more diverse group of Solar Prize applicants.
To compete in the Solar Prize, apply by October 5.
The prize program and the American-Made Network are funded by DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and are administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
For details about the Solar Prize Round 5, register here for an informational webinar on July 13 at 3 p.m. ET.
News item from DOE
Solarman says
“The new tool uses artificial intelligence to expand and develop the American-Made Network’s capabilities, helping fast-track development cycles. This tool will lower barriers to market entry for entrepreneurs by matching innovators to the exact resources they need, right when they need them.”
There is AI, there is professional systems programmed from the bottom up. Too often AI is called out when it is no more than a sophisticated professional system. SCADA systems that have been around for at least 40 years have increasingly incremented into ‘smart systems’, but this is all data table and parameter based decisions. The ‘real’ problem with AI would be directly ‘experienced based’, one goes through life with ‘good’ experiences and with ‘bad’ experiences. This is where AI can and will create it’s own biases that could actually limit options in the overall ‘thought’ process. From ‘experience’ good experiences are the answer for 98 out of 100 decisions. Bad experiences may represent 98 out of a 100 decision failures. Real AI would remove bias and find the best decision at the ‘time’ each time. Keeping bias out of AI will be an entire ‘thing’ in future programming exercises. You don’t want to end up with HAL 9000 from 2001 a space odyssey.
AI would be more of a collective ‘database’, with that in mind, what happens when someone finds a hack into the AI cloud and ransomwares that particular server farm?
Interesting: “To further incentivize this focus, competitors can win $300,000 in additional funds through a Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Contest. The two tracks of the competition will focus on hardware and software components separately, with the goal of enabling more entrepreneurs to compete in the solar space.”
The DOE has just announced (FEMP) to help Federal Government agencies adopt decarbonization and alternative energy strategies at the Government level and how would this (JEDI) become incorporated into that government standard. It’s looking like another caste system where the Government takes care of their energy efficiency transition and what exactly does FEMP DO? Will this ‘body’ decide the Military, law enforcement services like FBI, CIA, DHS, NSA, Pentagon get projects done first on the taxpayer dime? Somehow this smacks of the old FEMP vs JEDI death match scenario.