EERE Assistant Secretary Dr. David Danielson stands with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont at the state's new regional solar test center. | Photo credit Kevin Fitzmaurice, Energy Department.

Solar panels at the Regional Test Center in Vermont. | Photo credit Kevin Fitzmaurice, Energy Department.

Solar is now more affordable than ever, making it a clean, reliable energy option for homeowners, communities, and businesses throughout the country. The solar industry is now more than 60% of the way toward achieving the Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative affordability goal of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour for solar electricity. According to the Energy Information Administration, in the first six months of this year, renewable energy sources provided more than 14% of net U.S. electrical generation, an extraordinary milestone that many predicted wouldn’t happen until 2040. Solar-generated electricity, in particular, has more than doubled during this timeframe.

Despite this progress, barriers remain to wide-scale deployment of photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) systems. One of these barriers is the lack of testing facilities in the United States that enable American manufacturers to demonstrate and validate the performance and reliability of new PV and CPV technologies—critical steps to securing large-scale investments and growing the solar industry.

To address the need for test beds for large-scale systems, the Energy Department—in partnership with National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories—established five Regional Test Centers (RTC) across the nation. The centers provide industry and other key stakeholders with the sites, grid integration capability, and large-scale testing and data monitoring needed to:

• Validate performance of PV systems,
• Verify models used to predict performance,
• Collect detailed operations and maintenance data,
• Assess PV module quality, degradation rates, and system reliability issues, and
• Investigate the role of environmental factors on the reliability, durability, and safety of PV technologies.

The RTC in Williston, Vermont recently achieved a major milestone with the installation of a 66-kilowatt solar energy research system. Today, Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Dr. David Danielson toured the facility, which will focus on analyzing performance data and supporting collaborative research related to the integration of PV technologies into Vermont's electrical grid.  Sandia National Laboratories oversees the Vermont RTC, which is located on IBM property.

Watch this video to learn more about RTCs, and go to energy.gov/sunshot to find out how the Energy Department is making solar cost-competitive with conventional forms of electricity by the end of the decade.