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.
“In the real world, shade happens,” said Bessma Aljarbou, a graduate student at the MIT Sloan School of Management, during Unified Solar’s winning pitch last night to a capacity crowd. “Shade brings energy loss, reliability concerns, and a constrained market. And we have a solution.”
With the prize money, the team — including students from MIT, the California Institute of Technology, and Stanford University — aims to further develop the technology and launch the company. By 2015, the team aims to complete in-lab testing and pilot their technology in outdoor solar systems.
Unified Solar now becomes the finalist in the energy category in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, whose winner will be announced May 14.
Open to students at any U.S. university and now partnered with Cleantech Open, the competition aims to promote clean energy innovation and entrepreneurship across the nation and the globe, said CEP co-founder Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. “Sustainability is not just a problem for Cambridge,” Aulet said. “It’s a problem for the world.”
