General Electric receives $4.2 million in subsidies to develop photovoltaic inverter control technology

The work keeps pace with the nation’s changing electric grid system, which is drawing more energy from distributed and renewable resources.

Today, wind and solar inverters connected to the grid rely on existing voltage and frequency levels to deliver power. This is different from traditional generators (such as gas and steam turbines), which determine or form the voltage and frequency levels at which the grid operates. Developing "grid-tie" controls will allow wind and solar inverters to form voltage and frequency levels, just like traditional generators, creating opportunities for greater and more resilient integration of these resources into the grid.

“When it comes to solar and other renewable resources, all that energy is passed through an inverter,” said Michael Schmidt, senior engineer for power technologies at GE Research. “As the national grid gets more power from the sun and wind, it will need advanced inverters to maintain reliability.”

As part of this project, we will develop and field test advanced grid-forming controls that enable many distributed resources to deliver reliable and resilient power just like conventional generators. We will test and validate these new technologies using the GE Renewable Energy commercial PV LV5 inverter platform. Our goal is to have a solution ready for commercial deployment and implementation to support the nation’s growing solar portfolio,” he added.

The engineer explained that while grid-tied inverter control technology is not new, the biggest challenge is how to make so many distributed grid-tied inverter resources work together like traditional generators without causing stability issues. The team will address this problem with a holistic solution, including advanced grid-forming control, system modeling and analysis, and extensive testing and verification.

According to the latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. renewable energy generation doubled from 382 MWh in 2008 to 742 million MWh in 2018. During the same period, solar power generation increased nearly 50 times from 2 million MWh to 96 million MWh.

As part of a $4.2 million partnership award from SETO, GE and its partners will share $1.4 million in costs, bringing total funding for the project to $5.6 million.