Plug and Play Solar PV for American Homes

The Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE) will develop a new plug-and-play PV system that self-checks for proper installation and safety and communicates with the local utility and local jurisdiction to request permission to feed power into its smart meter. The utility and locality will remotely grant permission to the system to connect, and the PV system will immediately start to produce power to either consume in-house or feed into the distribution grid. In addition, the team will work with the national codes and standards community to identify hurdles for such a system, propose code changes, and develop technologies that will enable the system to be listed by Underwriters’ Laboratories and therefore not subject to local building inspections.

APPROACH
INNOVATIONS
OUTCOMES

The objective of this project is to develop, test, and validate a complete Plug and Play PV prototype system. The system will meet the following criteria:

Simple installation requiring fewer than ten man-hours of labor
Capability for 100% of the installation labor be performed by someone without prior PV experience
Automatic electrical permitting and inspection
Automatic structural permitting and inspection
Automatic utility interconnection agreement
Capability of being delivered, installed, and commissioned on the same day
Ability to ultimately meet the SunShot 2020 goal

The Fraunhofer CSE Plug and Play PV Systems project to reduce PV installation soft cost is distinctive in that it takes a holistic approach to the residential system design, focused on enabling fast installation with a lower skill level required for the installer, and automating permitting, inspection, and interconnection. The efforts span not only the PV system technology and architecture, but also the integration with business processes at local authorities having jurisdictions and utilities.