The U.S. Small Business Administration awarded a grant this week to Richardson, Texas-based Valere Power to use expertise developed in the telecom industry to develop a management system that improves the efficiency of solar power systems through better power extraction.

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant will allow Valere to do basic research on the management system. The SBIR grant program was begun in 1982 to encourage small businesses to pursue research and development projects. SBIR grants fund the start-up and development stages of R&D and encourage the commercialization of the technology, product or service it produces.

Valere, a provider of DC power systems for telecommunications applications--and one of the fastest growing players in the field, thanks in part to the acquisition last month by Norway Eltek ASA subsidiary, Eltek Energy--is tackling the system management of solar, or photovoltaic, systems.

Al Cioffi, vice president of business development for Valere Power, said in a statement that the company has been able to draw on many of the techniques and technologies that have been applied to telecommunications power systems to propose a solution that can help increase the use of solar power to feed the world’s increasing need for electricity.

System management provides the operator of a photovoltaic system with detailed environmental and performance information for each system component (panels, inverters, environmental sensors and protection devices). The photovoltaic panel, which comprises most of the system, is particularly important because today’s management systems provide little information on efficiency and operational status. More information in these areas can allow system tuning for increased power extraction. Today’s management systems are not integrated across the entire photovoltaic system and can cost many thousands of dollars per array.

In its grant application, Valere laid out an integrated solution that combines low-cost sensors in each solar power system component with an overall system controller that leverages computing power built into the power inverter. Depending on the installation, the system can be tied together using wireless or powerline networking technology.

The system will collect and process data to give solar power operators more operational information including, system state of health, photovoltaic panel conversion efficiency, performance correlation with the environment (weather, time of day, shading) and long-term performance trends. It also will alert operators to problems with the system.