Frank Van Mierlo: The tremendous success story of solar has
been the continuous decline in cost.
And it's been a really steep curve.
Vikram Aggarwal: Imagine in the next few years if the number
of houses installing solar may increase by ten times.
Charlie Gay: SunShot is an initiative that brings together
a number of public and private stakeholders, all motivated by bringing down the cost of
solar.
6 cents a kilowatt hour was the target originally set.
We believe we can cut that 6 cent goal down to 3 cent a kilowatt hour by 2030.
Work at SunShot is oriented toward high-risk research and development.
Opportunities that we can identify help fill a pipeline of possibilities for reaching the
3 cent per kilowatt hour objective.
The work that SunShot funds with 1366 enables the opportunity for getting to our 3 cent
per kilowatt hour goal to be accelerated, in this case by taking cost out of the manufacturing
of solar wafers.
Frank Van Mierlo: A solar panel is made from silicon wafers.
The silicon wafer that we make-we go directly from hyper-pure silicon to the wafer.
One step, one machine, no waste.
Today we have full-size manufacturing machines operating in an engineering environment.
The next step is to build a commercial factory where all the logistics are streamlined to
minimize cost.
Solar can also become the cheapest form of energy that mankind has ever seen and we're
on track to achieve that.
Charlie Gay: SunShot is helping address reducing costs
by reducing risk.
Our National Renewable Energy Lab is unique...
NREL helps us evaluate the performance of solar in different locations.
We want to be predictable.
We want to know that a product is built to last.
Sarah Kurtz: Three cents a kilowatt hour is the target.
NREL is looking at a number of different possible solutions that could contribute.
We have a module that's been very fun to watch.
The module design allows it to operate at a lower temperature than what's normal.
Every two degrees centigrade you can reduce the operating temperature, you increase the
efficiency by one percent.
The most challenging part of meeting the three cents a kilowatt hour goal is to simultaneously
get to higher efficiency, lower cost, long lifetime, low degradation rate.
We can do all of those individually but doing them all together in one product is the challenge.
I'm a hundred percent confident we're going to get there.
Charlie Gay: Somebody who wants to go solar is confronted
with, "How do I do this?"
SunShot in its soft costs program helped fund EnergySage to make a convenient portal to
the world of solar.
Vikram Aggarwal: What we at EnergySage are trying to do is
make buying and selling solar really simple and efficient.
And the way we are doing that is by offering an online marketplace.
You come to our website, you identify your home on a google map, you tell us how much
money you are spending on a monthly basis on electricity.
We take that information and we send it out to a network of solar installation companies
that we have pre-screened.
So we present these quotes in a matrix-like format, so you can very easily and quickly
compare them side-by-side in an apples to apples format.
What we are seeing is that consumers who get 4 to 5 quotes end up converting at a much
higher rate than consumers who get one or two quotes.
We are helping increase those conversion rates from those 3 to 5 consumers to all the way
to 15 to 20 consumers.
Nearly all homeowners can now afford solar.
Charlie Gay: Storage is important for expanding the solar
market because the sun isn't shining all the time but people need electricity all the time.
Storage levels all of that out and creates an even playing field.
Austin Energy is helping us get to our 2030 goals by trying out the new technologies combining
solar with storage.
Lisa Martin: When you pair storage with solar, then you
are really changing the way that solar can be used.
Austin Shines is a project that really allows us to study energy storage in a number of
different ways.
We're looking at energy storage paired with solar at the grid-scale level, at the commercial
level, and also at the residential level.
Our Austin Shines project puts storage on six homes but we're looking at eighteen additional
residences that have solar capacity.
The Austin Shines project gives us a way to test out a number of different uses for energy
storage and a number of different ways to interconnect it and to communicate through
controls and whatnot.
We're testing it all out now.
We're trying it all out now.
We're gonna see what's the optimal mix and then that's what we're gonna run with, here
in the Austin area.
Charlie Gay: SunShot is in a unique position.
We're able to help innovations become commercial realities because we have visibility to the
need for electricity, the value of electricity, and the manufacturing world in which the commercialization
of technology is taking place.
Sarah Kurtz: 3 cents a kilowatt hour is substantially less
than the retail rate that most people are paying for their electricity.
We can look at an even lower rate eventually.
Hitting a lower target would be very beneficial to mankind.
Frank Van Mierlo: If we actually do what we are setting out
to do we'll have the cheapest form of energy that we've ever seen which will be an enormous
benefit for the economy as a whole.-