Regional Test Center: Vermont Site

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Vermont will be the site of the nation's fourth DOE-supported Regional Test Center (RTC) for solar technologies, complementing sites that are currently under development in Florida, Colorado and New Mexico. The inclusion of Vermont as an RTC site will make much-needed cold weather assessments of performance and long-term degradation of solar systems possible, while also offering an exceptional platform for testing system functionality and performance of PV in an enhanced grid environment. Vermont the first state in the nation to deploy a statewide smart grid-offers particular emphasis on smart grid-related testing capabilities including power regulation, VAR sourcing and sinking and even integrated storage management. Development and management of the Vermont RTC will be led by Sandia National Laboratories, with leveraged in-kind support from the partners of Vermont's Center for Energy Transformation and Innovation, a collaborative project comprised of several leading institutions involved in developing Vermont's statewide smart grid. The Vermont RTC will contain more infrastructure than a typical test-bed PV system and will engage a broader community of suppliers of advanced power electronics, storage systems and communication technologies. Overall, the test bed will bring together PV module and inverter manufacturers, utility engineers and solar integrators to explore the critical issues associated with the integration of solar electricity into the smart grid, resulting in more data, better understanding of grid integration from a systems perspective and improved prospects for commercialization. The Vermont RTC will have the capacity to assess between 100 and 250kW of integrated PV systems. The validation plan encompasses several critical factors, all of which directly influence PV system performance and reliability. These include: system design, baseline module characterization and testing, developing performance coefficients, installation analysis, acceptance testing, performance monitoring and real-time analysis, periodic testing, in-depth analysis and validation of performance and predictions, reliability assessments and a decommissioning study. Although the details of Vermont RTC infrastructure are yet to be determined and will likely change during the operational life of the RTC, the infrastructure will be robust enough to accommodate a variety of functioning PV systems and to allow easy removal and replacement of modules and other components as new evaluations are brought on-line. The RTC will include a well-defined data acquisition system consisting of multiple sensors for various current, voltage, power, temperature and other measurements; a weather station for meteorological measurements, calibration equipment for the measurement systems, communication equipment and additional test equipment for indoor baseline module evaluations prior to installation. Like the other three RTCs, the Vermont RTC will utilize the technology validation plan currently being developed, enabling all four sites to have a uniform methodology of data management and analysis.