Through this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), the Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) will provide funding for multi-stakeholder collaborations to reduce material usage, improve installation quality and resilience of PV systems, and address handling of PV systems at the end of life. This FOA calls for diverse teams to assess impact of the developed technologies on all the life stages of PV systems in terms of energy use, cost, and environmental impact. The holistic technological solutions developed in the projects funded by this FOA will facilitate rapid growth of PV deployment in the U.S. in the next decade.

Topic Area 1: MORE Connection: Connecting PV Materials, Design, Installation, Performance, and End of Life

This Topic Area will use $12 million of non-Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) funding to fund collaborations of diverse stakeholders who can bring expertise from all life stages of the PV system lifecycle to reduce cost and lifecycle impacts of a PV system and its components, including co-located storage. Projects funded in this topic area will develop technology and design solutions to optimize the interconnected energy, economic, and environmental impact metrics in pursuit of rapid and sustainable scale-up of PV technologies.

Specific areas of interest include:

• Design of PV systems and PV system components that minimizes the use of materials, especially critical materials.
• Development of characterization and non-destructive testing of bill of materials (BOM) of PV system components throughout their life.
• Development and implementation of holistic design for engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) of PV systems that can simultaneously optimize energy, economic, and environmental metrics during the system’s useful life under relevant operating conditions, in a high deployment environment.
• Scalable hardware and software solutions for robust, error-free, low-maintenance tools, components, and methods for installation, quality management, and maintenance.

Topic Area 2: Solar Partnership to Advance Recycling and Circularity (Solar PARC)

This topic area uses funds designated by the BIL and seeks to fund one research partnership at a maximum of $8 million dedicated to improving materials recovery efficiency and developing safe end-of-life (EOL) practices for PV system components, including modules, inverters, and other balance-of-system (BOS) components. The partnership will focus on technologies and methods to enable low-cost reuse, refurbishing, repair, and recycling of photovoltaic materials, and best practices for safe disposal of these materials, and will include data collection, analysis, and working groups to enable effective collaborations and technology transfer.

The teaming list for the FOA is here.