INNOVATION
Breaking our own records.
Our data-driven, integrated approach to innovation propels us to continuously achieve new milestones in the renewable energy industry for cost, scale and reliability.
Hardwired for innovation.
Engineers and scientists are embedded across our team. At every position, innovators with multi-domain expertise push the best ideas forward by finding better-fit solutions to improve smart power plant performance for years to come.
How we keep improving.
Our innovation process is grounded in four pillars that let us address evolving needs as we transition to 100% clean energy.
Delivering solar at record-low costs
Situation: Create a power plant with record high capacity to optimize existing transmission infrastructure.
Approach: Sized the solar array to simultaneously charge the battery and deliver full power capacity to the grid.
Impact: Patented design will be used to generate enough clean power to serve over 7% of Los Angeles’ energy needs day or night, at record low-prices—cheaper than fossil fuels.
Plant optimization at our fingertips
Situation: Create highly optimized smart power plants with consideration for site specific conditions and constraints, equipment performance data, cost roadmaps, site and design cost drivers, control modes, utility rate programs, and more.
Approach: Replaced manual modeling with first-of-its-kind digital twin tool that integrates different technologies, applications and cross-functional team input into one automated computation.
Impact: Evaluates thousands of plant designs for a single project, assessing tradeoffs in design, land usage, cost, performance, and revenue, to optimize for best-fit, lowest-cost solutions. Allows Avantus to optimize plant efficiency and value to meet innovative offtake contracts or merchant market exposure.
First movers on bifacial modules
Situation: Bifacial modules had potential to substantially improve performance and reduce cost but engineers had low confidence in actual performance.
Approach: Conducted side-by-side performance assessments for over a dozen different types of bifacial modules at our proprietary R&D facility, to get first look at quantifying potential and validate understanding at a small scale. Then deployed multi-megawatt sized bifacial pilot blocks at Redwood 4, within a larger monofacial facility to gather true commercial data.
Impact: We were among the first to deploy bifacial modules at utility scale, which gave us holistic understanding to model future projects with this disruptive technology.
Unlocking the impossible for smart solar
Situation: The world needs a power supply that is as networked and as responsive as the digital tools that drive the rest of our world.
Approach: Create advanced software controls that can integrate solar energy generation and storage into one intelligent system, to manage thousands of signals from power converters, operator commands and system limits.
Impact: After rigorous development and testing over three years with LADWP and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), our advanced controls technology is now being scaled for deployment at some of the largest hybrid solar and storage plants in the world. The controls enable a utility to operate a solar plant as if it were a conventional generator, but without the carbon emissions.
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Making green hydrogen a reality
Situation: Green hydrogen is a carbon-free fuel that can be stored and transported, but producing it is complex and currently cost-prohibitive.
Approach: Leverage our integrated design approach to optimize plant assets, from renewable generation to hydrogen transportation systems to electrolyzer capacity, and deliver green hydrogen at the lowest cost.
Impact: Our Avantus Hydrogen class of power plants will provide clean electricity and green hydrogen, which can be used as an industrial gas or for long-duration energy storage, which can support resiliency storage requirements, maintain system inertia and enable 24/7 supply.
Innovating from every angle.
Our unique combination of development, execution and technology is what sparks innovation.
DEVELOPMENT
Building best-fit, least cost solutions for a range of customers.
Products
Designing smart power plants that deliver reliable, low-cost energy.
Services
Delivering clean energy through a network of smart power plants.