MIT Team Wins Clean Energy Prize for Solving Solar’s Shade Problem
An MIT team, including MBA students from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, whose integrated chip restores lost power to partially shaded solar panels — achieving double the energy capture improvement of similar technologies — won top honors at the seventh annual MIT Clean Energy Prize (CEP) competition.
Equipped with a promising business plan and a snappy catchphrase — “shade happens” — Unified Solar took home both CEP grand prizes: the DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Clean Energy Prize, worth $100,000, and the NSTAR MIT Clean Energy Prize, worth $125,000.
Solar panels on residential rooftops that are partially shaded by clouds or trees sacrifice as much as 30 percent of their energy potential over a year. Unified Solar’s technology, for the first time, integrates an entire power balance circuit onto a low-cost chip that can be integrated into a solar panel to regain that lost energy. Continue reading…
