Objective
Basic power needs in villages and rural settings, is currently the fastest grow ing market for PV applications, at a rate above 20% per year, shared between hi ghly engineered (and expensive) products and locally engineered PV systems. Bey ond the issue of the initial investment cost, achieving large scale market pene tration also implies reducing system cost over the system lifetime by ensuring availability of reliable and appropriate Balance of System Components (BOS: bat teries, charge controllers, small inverters and the appliances themselves) whic h generally represent at least 80% of system cost over its lifetime. The con cept of the ALERT consortium is: - to develop an improved charge controller us ing the CMS technology with a micro controller, that can sustain charge - disch arge patterns of poor quality batteries, and is in a box which is user friendly for dwellers of remote rural areas and tamper proof. With this product, the SM E coordinator expects to multiply his market penetration (from 2000 to 10 000 u nits / year); - to specify an electronic ballast: the target price is ECU 15. There are no products currently available on the market and specially designed for PV applications. Products available vary between ECU 20 and ECU 40; - to s pecify a small inverter ( 100 to 200 W) suited to the daily needs of small scal e PV systems in remote rural areas. The only products available are designed fo r occasional use with, as a consequence, a very low life duration if used on a daily basis; - to develop a franchised package comprising: equipment for local assembly of small 10 W PV modules that can be produced in a small workshop, wi th an investment cost less than ECU 20 000 which can be franchised to developin g country entrepreneurs. The project complies with the scope and objectives of the programme by reinforcing the costeffectiveness and the overall quality o f service which renewable energy technologies can provide to end users. It will also contribute to meet the basic electric power needs in village and rural se ttings. The consortium, comprising two UK and two French SMEs of which two a re system integrators and manufacturers and two engineering firms with strong p artnerships in developing countries have the capability of moving the products developed in collaboration with a specialised German institute from the prototy pe stage to market testing and full scale industrialisation and commercialisati on. The project is thus divided in 4 Workpackages: 1. Technical Analysis of Balance of systems components suited for small scale PV systems in remote rur al settings 2. Testing and analysis of the above 3 BOS components and 10W modu les 3. Product development fof charge controllers and 10W modules 4. Field te sting and commercialisation strategy.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectrical engineeringelectric energy
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managemententrepreneurship
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energysolar energyphotovoltaic
You need to log in or register to use this function
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CRS - Cooperative research contractsCoordinator
34430 Laverune - Saint-Jean-de-Vedas
France