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October 2019
First-Ever American-Made Solar Prize Concludes, Awards Round 1 Winners: Phase3 Photovoltaics, Solar Inventions
Round 1 of the American-Made Solar Prize concluded as two final winners received $500,000 each.
September 2019
Call Sherry: Engineer Helps Tribes, Alaskan Villages Find Energy Solutions
In many tribal communities, electricity is expensive, unreliable, or completely unavailable. NREL Engineer Sherry Stout works with such communities, helping them use renewable energy to reduce costs and access reliable power.
Benefits of Agrivoltaics Across the Food-Energy-Water Nexus
In a recent article for Nature Sustainability, NREL's Lead Energy-Water-Land Analyst Jordan Macknick and co-authors investigated the potential benefits of co-located agriculture and solar photovoltaic (PV) infrastructure (dubbed “agrivoltaics”) on food production, irrigation water requirements, and energy production.
Unique New Prototype Brings NREL Collaborators Together
Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator member company Yotta Solar brought their behind-the-panel battery system to NREL for analysis this summer. It's a technology so new, researchers from multiple disciplines were pushed to develop next-generation evaluation techniques.
August 2019
NREL, First Solar Collaboration Improves Thin-Film Solar Cells
A new paper reports a cell efficiency of 20.8%, representing a crossing point for the new group V technology relative to historic copper technology.
Twin Scientists Advance Understanding of PV Windows
The brothers both previously worked at NREL, although the older one is now a university professor in Wisconsin.
From the Bottom Up: Designing a Decentralized Power System
Cross-Discipline Team Envisions the Grid of the Future
July 2019
NREL Brings Promising High-Efficiency Solar Cell Down to Earth
The newly published research in Nature Communications details how the NREL researchers refined the D-HVPE process to produce solar cells more than 20 times faster than the process now commonly used.
White House Honors Two NREL Researchers with Early Career Awards
Winners of the PECASE are nominated by a participating federal agency--the Department of Energy in this case--with the final selections made by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Researchers Propose Techno-Ecological Synergy for Solar-Sustainability Win-Win
While solar generation helps to significantly reduce emissions in the energy sector, ground-mounted solar arrays can still lead to environmental impacts. NREL analysts argue that a new framework can help mitigate, or even avoid, environmental degradation.
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Last Updated May 5, 2025