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Belgium's Red Electrical Devils Win $1 Million for Innovative Inverter Design
http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2016/23654[font face=Serif][font size=5]Belgium's Red Electrical Devils Win $1 Million for Innovative Inverter Design[/font]
[font size=4]NREL provided critical information to help determine the winner[/font]
February 29, 2016
[font size=3]Google and IEEE announced today that Belgium's Red Electrical Devils, a team from CE+T Power, has won the Little Box Challenge, a competition to invent a much smaller inverter for interconnecting solar power systems to the power grid. The success earned the team a $1 million prize while proving that inverters can be the size of a tablet or smaller rather than the size of a picnic cooler, more than a factor of 10 reduction in size. The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) provided critical analysis of the 18 finalists teams' inverters to help determine the winner.
On Oct. 21, 2015, each of the finalists brought their inverters to the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) on the NREL campus in Golden, Colorado, for testing. "The overall idea was to test these inverters in a similar fashion to how they would be used out in the field," said Blake Lundstrom, the NREL project lead.
…
The Red Electrical Devils were declared the winner by a consensus of judges from Google, the IEEE Power Electronics Society, and NREL. Their inverter had a power density of 143 W/in³-far greater than the minimum requirement of 50 W/in³ and 50% higher than the nearest competitor-and a volume of only 14 cubic inches, smaller in volume than a cube measuring 2.5 inches on each side. The winning inverter also performed better on measurements of electromagnetic compliance (the amount of electrical noise emitted from the unit).
Shrinking inverters by an order of magnitude and making them cheaper to produce and install will enable more solar-powered homes and more efficient distribution grids, while helping bring electricity to remote areas. A key factor in the winning inverters was the use of wide bandgap semiconductors, a technology that enables power electronics to operate at higher voltages and temperatures, allowing them to transmit more energy through a smaller volume.
…[/font][/font]
[font size=4]NREL provided critical information to help determine the winner[/font]
February 29, 2016
[font size=3]Google and IEEE announced today that Belgium's Red Electrical Devils, a team from CE+T Power, has won the Little Box Challenge, a competition to invent a much smaller inverter for interconnecting solar power systems to the power grid. The success earned the team a $1 million prize while proving that inverters can be the size of a tablet or smaller rather than the size of a picnic cooler, more than a factor of 10 reduction in size. The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) provided critical analysis of the 18 finalists teams' inverters to help determine the winner.
On Oct. 21, 2015, each of the finalists brought their inverters to the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) on the NREL campus in Golden, Colorado, for testing. "The overall idea was to test these inverters in a similar fashion to how they would be used out in the field," said Blake Lundstrom, the NREL project lead.
…
The Red Electrical Devils were declared the winner by a consensus of judges from Google, the IEEE Power Electronics Society, and NREL. Their inverter had a power density of 143 W/in³-far greater than the minimum requirement of 50 W/in³ and 50% higher than the nearest competitor-and a volume of only 14 cubic inches, smaller in volume than a cube measuring 2.5 inches on each side. The winning inverter also performed better on measurements of electromagnetic compliance (the amount of electrical noise emitted from the unit).
Shrinking inverters by an order of magnitude and making them cheaper to produce and install will enable more solar-powered homes and more efficient distribution grids, while helping bring electricity to remote areas. A key factor in the winning inverters was the use of wide bandgap semiconductors, a technology that enables power electronics to operate at higher voltages and temperatures, allowing them to transmit more energy through a smaller volume.
…[/font][/font]
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