PI Energy Receives DOE’s American-Made Solar Prize in Photovoltaics

We're delighted to share that PI Energy is a recipient of the American-Made Solar Prize in Photovoltaics! This is funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). This vote of confidence from the Solar Technologies Office provides us funding to "to spur innovations in U.S. solar hardware ... and address challenges to rapid, equitable solar energy deployment."

20 Teams were selected from 6 categories of applicants across the US as semifinalists to advance their technologies with the first round of prize funding, along with the opportunity to apply for later stages of the competition. It also includes access to the American-Made Network of more than 300 organizations and experts from the DOE’s 17 national labs, clean tech accelerators, incubators, universities, facilities, and more.

In the Photovoltaics category, we also think it’s important to point out that we are the only novel solar cell technology company. Much of this is due to the difficulty of bringing and entirely new technology to market, rather than just incremental changes using existing technology.

You can read more about the American-Made Solar funding and award recipients here.

So where does PI Energy’s technology fit into this? Some new EV cars from Audi, Toyota, Sono Motors, Hyundai, Fisker, Aptera, Lightyear One, and Mercedes-Benz are experimenting with solar PV options. However, Vehicle-Integrated Photovoltaic (VIPV) high-volume mass-market adoption will require lower-cost solar PV with features that aren’t available in any market-ready solutions. VIPV is a growing, high-margin unaddressed market for solar PV, and the current market-available solar PV technologies are not ideal because of issues with one or more from the list of: weight, flexibility, durability, toxicity, or the ability to practically and cost-effectively be applied to electric vehicles in high volume. PI Energy technology can wrap onto electric vehicles, extending range independent of the grid.

We look forward to advancing our research with the help of this funding and appreciate the recognition of the DOE that this is a problem that needs addressing.