Try as he might, Vlatko Vlatkovic won’t make the sun shine brighter. So when he wanted to make a more efficient solar farm, he and his team had to go for the next best thing: a gray plastic box the size of a small hut called the inverter. “It takes direct current from the PV panels and turns it into alternating current that you can use,” says Vlatkovic, chief engineering officer at GE Power Conversion. “Since the inverter system also represents as much as 20 percent of the capital costs of the farm, you could make a huge impact if you made it more efficient.”
