Company offers micro-grid/solar solution for military.

• Author: Beidel, Eric
• Position: Defense Technology Newswire

* A New Jersey company that installs solar panels on existing utility poles has begun making a hard pitch to the military.

Petra Solar Inc. recently received a $200 million contract that calls for the installation of 200,000 of the company's SunWave units throughout New Jersey. The pole-mounted panels, which are equipped with smart-grid communication devices, could easily be translated for use on military bases, said Johan Enslin, the company's chief technology officer.

"The cost of [foreign oil], especially to the military and forward operating bases, even local bases, is really very high," he said. The loss is not just measured in dollars, he added, as truck drivers sustain casualties transporting fuel through Afghanistan to the front lines.

Enslin described the system as a "smart energy module installed on a photovoltaic panel" that performs the DC-to-AC power conversion directly on the panel itself. One of the devices...