ARPA-E Modular Solid-State Transformer Program Awards Georgia Tech
- ARPA-E CIRCUITS program: $30M across 21 wide-bandgap power-electronics projects
- Georgia Tech SST: 4-13 kV, up to 50 kW 1-phase / 150 kW 3-phase, SiC-based
- PI Deepak Divan (Georgia Tech); partners Southern Company and EPRI
- Four barriers addressed: HV insulation, thermal, topology, fault protection
- Eaton completed acquisition of SST-maker Resilient Power Systems Aug 20, 2025
ARPA-E’s Modular Solid-State Transformers project, funded under the agency’s $30 million, 21-project CIRCUITS program, awarded Georgia Tech to develop a silicon-carbide solid-state transformer (SST) for the 4 kV to 13 kV medium-voltage distribution interface, with Professor Deepak Divan as principal investigator and Southern Company and EPRI as partners.
The program
The Creating Innovative and Reliable Circuits Using Inventive Topologies and Semiconductors (CIRCUITS) program committed $30 million across 21 projects to advance wide-bandgap power electronics, principally silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN). ARPA-E’s stated rationale is that wide-bandgap devices are the highest-leverage federal R&D opportunity in grid power conversion, shrinking converter size and loss versus silicon. The Georgia Tech SST award sits inside that thesis: replace the passive iron-core distribution transformer with an actively controlled SiC converter.
The Georgia Tech project
The Georgia Tech Research Corporation project, led by Deepak Divan with partners Southern Company and EPRI, targets a modular SST rated up to 50 kW single-phase, extending to 150 kW three-phase, at the 4 kV to 13 kV medium-voltage distribution interface. The design is built for compact size and high performance using SiC devices. It explicitly addresses the four engineering barriers that have historically blocked commercial SST deployment at distribution voltage: high-voltage insulation, thermal management, voltage-stepping topology, and protective coordination against downstream fault currents.
Applications and the wider portfolio
The ARPA-E project description lists grid energy storage, solar PV interconnect, EV fast charging, grid monitoring, and retrofit of existing distribution-transformer locations as target applications, a cross-cutting set that matches how the commercial SST market has since developed. Beyond Georgia Tech, ARPA-E has funded SST-related work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the NC State FREEDM Systems Center, and the University of Arkansas. This combined federal investment is the largely unseen R&D foundation under the 2025-2026 commercial SST wave.
Lab-to-market signal
The commercial pull on this research is now visible. On August 20, 2025, Eaton completed its acquisition of Resilient Power Systems, a developer of SST-based grid, EV-charging, and data-center power equipment, citing higher power density in a smaller footprint than conventional transformers. The acquisition shows a major OEM betting that distribution-class SST has crossed from lab demonstration toward product, the transition ARPA-E’s CIRCUITS investment was designed to enable.
Critical perspective
Editorial correction. This post is part of MGRID’s Solid-State Transformer coverage. As of May 2026, that body of work systematically framed manufacturer announcements, funding rounds, and laboratory demonstrations as commercial deployments. The reality is that field-deployed commercial-class SST in revenue service globally is measured in single digits, and almost every product cited in this series is at “announced” or “funded” stage, not “operational.” The ARPA-E Georgia Tech award is a research grant, not a deployed product, and earlier versions of this post overstated the Resilient Power Systems lineage and acquisition terms; those specifics have been removed. Readers should treat claims here against our SST Industry Reality Check, the canonical per-claim audit mapping marketing language to verifiable deployment status.
Critical Perspective
The Georgia Tech project on 4-13 kV solid-state transformers (SSTs), while promising, faces significant engineering and financial constraints not fully addressed by ARPA-E’s funding announcement. The project aims to develop a SiC-based module with up to 50 kW single-phase or 150 kW three-phase capacity, yet the current market standard for medium-voltage transformers is far above these scales. According to Watt-Logic’s industry reality checks, most deployed SSTs are still at lab-demo stages and haven’t demonstrated full-scale operational performance. The CIRCUITS program’s $30M investment across 21 projects averages just over $1.4 million per project, a sum that may not be sufficient for the rigorous testing and field deployment needed to validate these technologies on a commercial scale. If the Georgia Tech SSTs are to replace traditional transformers in utility-scale applications, they must prove their reliability under real-world conditions, which requires extensive testing and validation. The question remains: how will these modules perform when scaled up from 50 kW to the megawatt levels required by utilities? The financial burden of this scale-up could be substantial, potentially leading to cost overruns or capacity shortfalls if the technology fails to meet expectations. How can we ensure that the $30M investment translates into reliable and economically viable SSTs for utility-scale applications without these critical validation steps being overlooked?
Why it matters
The CIRCUITS-to-Eaton arc is one of the clearest examples of federal pre-commercial R&D translating into a domestic industrial base in grid power electronics. If the Georgia Tech class of SiC SST reaches distribution-voltage cost parity, ARPA-E’s $30 million bet will have seeded the controllable transformer that lets utilities absorb EV, solar, and storage load at the grid edge without rebuilding feeders.
