San Diego's Sanyo North America Corp., which will contribute the $3 million over three years, said it expects the partnership to lead to the next generation of solar energy systems and energy management.

The research will build on Sanyo's Smart Energy System concept, designed to improve the stability and reliability of renewable energy, the company said.

Initial research will cover forecasting solar production and the storage of solar power.

Solar forecasting will focus on research under way at UCSD by a professor who is using advanced weather stations and sky imaging tools and instruments to create hourly solar production forecasts. The aim is to determine when to store and release solar energy throughout the day.

"What we are seeing are intense efforts to innovate incrementally across the supply chain to improve everything from the solar panels to the battery storage," said Monique Hanis, spokeswoman for the Solar Energy Industries Association in Washington, The San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

"We are moving toward a clean-energy future, and we are trying to bring down the cost and make the source more ubiquitous," Hanis said.

UCSD officials said the energy research agreement with Sanyo could eventually allow a number of campus facilities to completely unplug from the electric grid.

But the long-term aim is to develop a smart energy system using renewable energy that could be used even when the sun is hidden by clouds.

California utility San Diego Gas & Electric has agreed to obtain 33 percent of its electricity portfolio from renewables by 2020.

"The type of integrated photovoltaic and energy-storage research at UC San Diego addresses one of the technological missing links California needs to develop in order to ensure reliability of solar-generated energy, even when the sun doesn't shine," Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said in a release.

A report released Thursday by the Worldwatch Institute shows that some 7,300 megawatts of new solar-based clean energy generation was installed around the world during 2009. This represents a 20 percent rate of growth over the previous year.

"It is our hope that through this agreement, we can create a value-added system to offer the United States as a whole, expanding the concept of a smart-grid society beyond the boundaries of this campus and San Diego," said Mitsuru Homma, executive vice president of Sanyo Electric.

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