With the Formula Sun Grand Prix / American Solar Challenge 2014 approaching in just a month, CalSol is in the process of organizing a list of generous friends and company sponsors who made it possible for us to engineer Zephyr and to enter in the SunRayce. In particular, the team decided to give a shout-out to our top three sponsors for this race. This shout-out to SunPower is dear to me because it’s what got me so hooked onto the team and also what led me to become the engineer that I am today.
SunPower Corporation is based in San Jose, Calif, and is America’s premier high-efficiency silicon solar cell designer & manufacturer. Almost all competitive teams participating in the American Solar Challenge use SunPower cells because not only are they efficient, they are also incredibly reliable. CalSol has been using SunPower cells dating as early as the late 90s, but we had never established a connection with the company until 2013.
With CalSol encapsulating our own solar cells for the first time this build season, we needed a lot of help. We talked to awesome local and corporate companies such as D2 Solar and Dunmore— the kind engineers from D2 solar and Dunmore gave us many samples to test and generously donated their time to troubleshoot our problems. We learned a lot, but we were far from being able to produce perfectly encapsulated panels.
By half-luck and half-coincidence, I got in contact with SunPower’s senior manager in business development. She is also a Cal grad and was intrigued by our project– and from there, the solar team’s progress took off quickly. We received bare SunPower solar cells, as well as invaluable engineering support from SunPower engineers. It’s been more than a year since SunPower and CalSol has been working closely together– and for over a year, the CalSol members have had the privilege of learning about the solar industry first-hand with the leading solar company in the world. And more importantly, we’ve had so much fun doing engineering.
The team is recognizing SunPower as one of our top three sponsors for Zephyr / ASC 2014. SunPower has not only provided CalSol with generous in-kind donation, but perhaps more importantly, invaluable engineering and moral support to the team. We know that the people at SunPower are busy individuals, and we cannot thank you enough for taking your time to help us with everything solar-related for Zephyr!