The Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technology Office (SETO), in cooperation with the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (Alliance), manager and operator of DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), seeks interest from industry (including any academic/stakeholder team members) and feedback on scenarios for operating a Regional Test Center (RTC) test bed located at the Solar Technology Acceleration Center (SolarTAC) in Aurora, Colorado. DOE works to achieve cost competitiveness and broad deployment of solar electric technologies in the United States. In support of these goals, the DOE launched five Regional Test Centers in 2011. One of the RTCs is operated under the NREL contract by Alliance and located on the SolarTAC site and the NREL site. SolarTAC is a 74-acre outdoor test facility owned by the City of Aurora and independently operated on behalf of SolarTAC’s sponsoring members. Recently DOE and NREL have expanded the RTC test bed located on the NREL site, which opens an opportunity for industry (including any academic/stakeholder team members) to operate the RTC test bed located on the SolarTAC site. It is the purpose of this Request for Information to identify interested industry (including any academic/stakeholder team members) and explore scenarios for transitioning the operation of the portion of the RTC test bed located at SolarTAC.
Request for Information Response Guidelines
Responses to this RFI must be submitted electronically to PVReliability@EE.Doe.Gov no later than 5:00pm (ET) on January 29, 2016. Responses must be provided as attachments to an email. Please include “SolarTAC” in the subject line. It is recommended that attachments with file sizes exceeding 25MB be compressed (i.e., zipped) to ensure message delivery. Responses must be provided as a Microsoft Word (.docx) attachment to the email, and no more than two pages in length, 12 point font, 1 inch margins. Only electronic responses will be accepted.
Please identify your answers by responding to a specific question or topic if applicable. Respondents may answer as many or as few questions as they wish.
EERE will not respond to individual submissions or publish publicly a compendium of responses. A response to this RFI will not be viewed as a binding commitment to develop or pursue the project or ideas discussed.
Respondents are requested to provide the following information at the start of their response to this RFI:
- Company / institution name;
- Company / institution contact;
- Contact's address, phone number, and e-mail address.