Google wants to see the size of inverters shrink – and will award a million dollars to the person or team that comes up with the best design.
An inverter in a grid connected solar power system is the largish box separate from the solar panels that takes the DC current produced by the modules and converts it to AC; suitable for use in the home or for exporting to the mains grid.
In an off-grid solar system, the solar inverter performs a similar function, but converts the DC power from a bank of deep cycle batteries.
Google’s “Little Box Challenge” isn’t looking for slightly smaller inverters, but a unit that is around the size of a notebook computer – a reduction of more than 10 X in volume of standard solar inverters today.
While microinverters are already available, these are module level electronics and rated to up to just a few hundred watts. Competition participants will need to develop a kW-scale inverter with a power density of at least 50 Watts per cubic inch.
Why?
“We expect that the innovations inspired by this prize will have wide applicability across these areas, increasing efficiency, driving down costs, and opening up new uses cases that we can’t imagine today. It also doesn’t hurt that many of these improvements could make our data centers run more safely and efficiently.”
Interested parties need register their team by September 30, 2014. By July next year, a technical approach and testing application must be completed. In October 2015, 18 finalists will be selected and the winner will be announced in January 2016.
Google will not require any IP (intellectual property) or licenses to be granted to it, except a non-exclusive license that it says will be used only for the purpose of testing the inverter and publicizing the prize. The company says it may also choose to make public “some or all of the teams’ high-level technical approach documents”.
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