Energy Department Declares New Prize Challenge to Drive Down Solar Costs

The Energy Department on May 20 announced the SunShot Catalyst, a new prize competition to spur the rapid creation and development of products and solutions that address near-term challenges in the U.S. solar marketplace. Intended to tackle market barriers and address technical problems that can be solved through automation, algorithms, data, and software, SunShot Catalyst will leverage the reach and power of online crowdsourcing to generate ideas, spur business innovations, and develop prototypes.

The competition will also enable U.S. entrepreneurs to launch cutting-edge solar companies that can address some of the most relevant and time-sensitive market challenges by encouraging teams to engage and forge partnerships across the nation's growing networks of technology mentors, incubators, and accelerators.

The new prize competition was announced at the SunShot Summit, which takes place on May 20 to 22 in Anaheim, California. The summit brings together in excess of 800 solar energy leaders from across industry, academia, the policymaking community, and the Department's national labs to highlight the recent strides made by the solar industry to significantly reduce costs and deploy solar energy nationwide. The summit will also help illuminate the paths forward to meeting the ambitious SunShot Initiative affordability goal of cost-competitive utility-scale solar energy by 2020, while promoting growth in the solar market and strengthening America's energy security. See the Energy Department news release and the SunShot Catalyst website.

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