Posted in Solar Power World
Florida solar organizations to host job fair to kick off state’s Solar Energy Apprenticeship
Author: Kelly Pickerel
Colleen McCann Kettles, FSEC director of workforce and business development, is interviewed regarding the formation of the Solar Energy Apprenticeship, the first solar apprenticeship in the United States.
A building science expert with the FSEC Energy Research Center is part of a team that recently developed a first-of-its-kind tool that can calculate how much carbon dioxide buildings and homes produce.
“Climate change is a real problem, and the leading cause of it is carbon dioxide emissions,” says Philip Fairey, Deputy Director of FSEC, Florida’s premier energy research center at the University of Central Florida. “While the auto industry has made great strides in reducing carbon emissions from vehicles, the most well-known emitter of CO2, many people don’t know that buildings themselves are responsible for about 35% of greenhouse gas emissions due to burning fossil fuels for power, heating and cooling.”
Fairey is a board member of the Residential Energy Services Network, or RESNET, which created the tool. RESNET is a not-for-profit organization founded to develop a national market for home energy efficiency.
“With the nation’s climate goal of reducing U.S. emissions by half by the year 2030, it’s vital to have measurement tools to determine what causes these emissions and how to reduce them,” Fairey says. “That’s where RESNET comes in.”
RESNET’s new tool is called the CO2e Rating Index and is the first of its kind.
With photovoltaic plants having the highest installation rate of all power sources in the last five years, the need for monitoring these plants is essential in maintaining power output and life expectancy. Are the current industry standard utility-scale monitoring systems enough to appropriately detect possible faults that could lead to power failure? A team at the Florida Solar Energy Center has spent the last five years studying the value proposition of high-resolution monitoring systems (HRMS) to determine its effectiveness on levelized cost of energy (LCOE) reduction.
“The project’s purpose is studying the value of monitoring the modules and strings in detecting the photovoltaic (PV) faults and its impact on LCOE,” Manjunath Matam, post-doctoral scholar at FSEC and project lead, says. “The PV modules and strings are all connected to the inverter and it is hard to detect the faults using the inverter data. Sometimes, the faults never get detected and cause huge power losses in the long run.”
So how does this U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored project benefit PV plant owners and investors? “The PV plant owners, investors, utility companies, stakeholders have no idea whether installing the HRMS equipment to monitor the modules and strings will add value, produce more power and generate revenue, or if it will just be an additional expenditure,” Matam says. “Our project, through its simulation, hardware, indoor and outdoor experiments, has observed that installing the HRMS equipment to monitor the strings will add value and is very beneficial since it can detect the faults, even the low power-loss causing faults, after a reasonable amount of time.”
COCOA, FL, June 30, 2022 – FSEC Energy Research Center at the University of Central Florida is proud to announce that it has earned a 2022 ENERGY STAR® Market Leader Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in recognition of its contribution to verifying energy-efficient new homes that have earned ENERGY STAR certification. ENERGY STAR certified homes are at least 10% more energy efficient than those built to code and achieve a 20% improvement on average while providing homeowners with better quality, performance, and comfort.
Neither the cloudy forecast nor pandemic concerns were enough to discourage the teams that came together on Saturday, April 30th for the 2022 EnergyWhiz event!
EnergyWhiz is a daylong celebration of sustainable solutions, creativity and engineering skills, where students from throughout Florida came together to showcase their renewable energy projects. This year, elementary, middle, and high school teams designed and built everything from solar-powered electric vehicles to sun-powered cookers and “green” homes for pets and other critters to showcase and share at EnergyWhiz.
The event, presented this year by sponsor Florida Power and Light Company, is hosted each year at the FSEC Energy Research Center, a research institute at the University of Central Florida, located at the Cocoa Campus of the UCF and Eastern Florida State College.
This year’s EnergyWhiz competitors participated in one of six categories: Junior Solar Sprint, Critter Comfort Cottage, Energy Inspired Art, Energy Innovations, Energy Transfer Machine and the Solar Energy Cook-off. Each competition category incorporates some type of energy efficiency measure or renewable energy technology.