$1m prize for innovative solar inverter design
A Belgium team from CE+T Power, the Red Electrical Devils, have won the Little Box Challenge, a competition to invent a much smaller inverter for interconnecting solar power systems to the power grid.
The success earned the team a $1 million prize while proving that inverters can be as small as a tablet (much smaller than what they currently are, which is about the size of a picnic cooler) by more than a factor of 10 reduction in size.
In July 2014, Google and the IEEE launched the open competition to design and build a small kW-scale inverter with a power density greater than 50 W/in3 while meeting a number of other specifications related to efficiency, electrical noise and thermal performance.
Over 2000 teams from around the world registered for the competition, and out of the proposals, 18 finalists were selected last October to bring their inverters to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado for testing.
“The overall idea was to test these inverters in a similar fashion to how they would be used out in the field,” said Blake Lundstrom, the NREL project lead.
Schneider Electric, Virginia Tech and the Red Electrical Devils all built 2 kW inverters that passed 100 hours of testing at NREL while adhering to the technical specifications of the competition.
Among the three finalists, the Red Electric Devils’ inverter had the highest power density and smallest volume.
Their inverter had a power density of 143 W/in3 — far greater than the minimum requirement of 50 W/in3, and 50% higher than the nearest competitor. It also had a volume of only 14 in3, smaller in volume than a cube measuring 2.5 inches on each side.
The winning inverter also performed better on measurements of electromagnetic compliance, which is the amount of electrical noise emitted from the unit.
The Red Electrical Devils were judged by a panel from Google, the IEEE Power Electronics Society and NREL.
The NREL commented that shrinking inverters by an order of magnitude, and making them cheaper to produce and install, will enable more solar-powered homes and more efficient distribution grids, while helping bring electricity to remote areas.
For more information, go to www.littleboxchallenge.com.
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