California regulators on Thursday approved an ambitious project to beam solar energy from space starting in 2016.
Under a power purchase agreement approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, utility Pacific Gas & Electric will purchase electricity from technology provider Solaren if it successfully deploys its space-based solar collectors, which would be the first of its kind.
PG&E has contracted to buy 1,700 gigawatt hours per year for 15 years from Solar for its space-based solar arrays, which will have a generating capacity of 200 megawatts. That's smaller than a full scale nuclear or natural gas plant but enough to supply thousands of homes. The anticipated date of operation is June, 2016.
(Credit:
PG&E)
Space-based solar, an idea that has been around for decades, is being pursued by companies and researchers around the world. Its key advantage over land-based solar or wind power is that can generate renewable energy around the clock. The California Public Utilities Commission gave the go-ahead to the project in an effort to meet the state's aggressive renewable energy goals.
Solaren's plan calls for using satellites equipped with solar photovoltaic panels and mirrors to generate electricity, which is transmitted via microwaves to a ground receiver station in Fresno County, Calif. The receiver then converts the radio frequency energy to electricity and it is fed into the power grid.
Based in Southern California, Solaren is run by veterans from aerospace companies. Engineers have designed a relatively lightweight system around a Mylar mirror that's 1 kilometer in diameter to concentrate light onto the solar panels to squeeze more electricity from them, according to an article in Grist.
A PG&E representative on Thursday said that the utility will only pay Solaren if it delivers the power. The cost of the electricity is competitive with land-based renewable energy sources, he added.
"If this works, it would be a real game changer. But for our customers, there's really no or little risk, so it's worth supporting something that has credible people behind it with years of experience who think they can make it work," said Jonathan Marshall from PG&E.
When announcing the PG&E deal in April, Solaren CEO Gary Spirnak said the company plans to run pilot tests before an actual launch, drawing on company employees' experience in aerospace.
"Once in geosynchronous orbit, a series of SSP (space solar power) pilot plant system tests will validate the satellites and ground receive station functions and verify performance, safety and key parameters to ensure successful operations. When we complete these steps, we will then be ready to deliver power to PG&E in 2016," Sprinak said.
LOS ANGELES--Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures-backed solar-thermal start-up Ausra is in talks with three potential buyers to sell itself, two sources familiar with the company told Reuters on Friday.
The buyers could take a majority stake or snag the whole company and the discussions are at a "very aggressive level," said one source familiar with the company, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Both sources said the interested companies were global conglomerates in the power generation business but declined to name them. The companies already have various power products, such as steam and gas turbines, and are committed to renewable energy. One interested party has engaged with Ausra previously, one source said.
Ausra declined to comment.
A sale of the high-profile Silicon Valley start-up that has raised $130 million in venture capital would add to a string of recent deals and growing consolidation in the solar-power industry.
Chinese solar-wafer manufacturer ReneSola plans to buy Dynamic Green Energy while silicon maker MEMC Electronic Materials plans to acquire privately held SunEdison, which installs, maintains, and finances commercial solar systems.
Privately held Ausra, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., launched as a solar-thermal developer in 2006, when solar power and other clean technology were luring venture capitalists.
Two years ago the company landed a power purchasing agreement with California utility PG&E, a unit of PG&E Corp., for a 117-megawatt solar-thermal plant. Solar-thermal plants use the sun's rays to heat liquid to create steam, which drives turbines and generates electricity.
Earlier this year, the company switched tracks, saying it would move away from developing projects and focus on supplying large-scale solar steam generators.
This month Ausra said that it canceled its agreement with PG&E and sold the project's land to the largest U.S. solar-power company, First Solar, maker of thin-film solar cells.
Ausra also has deals in Jordan and Australia and other investors include Starfish Ventures and KERN Partners.
One source familiar with the company said that "extensive work" has been done at various stages of completion with the interested buyers.
"We're talking about meetings with dozens of people involved," said the person, who also was not authorized to speak publicly about the discussions.
Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Additional stories from Reuters
Cornell University house chose to use three Cor-Ten steel silos to reflect their rural landscape of upstate New York.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)WASHINGTON--If you designed a net zero-energy home, would it be a science experiment or something you'd move into as soon as it was done?
At this year's Solar Decathlon student competition, both approaches were on display: high-tech homes that cost well over $700,000 and simpler ones that could be made for as little as $80,000.
The contest pits 20 colleges against each other to build the
Student competitors said the whole point was to show what's possible with existing solar and energy-efficiency products, either from established providers or green-building start-ups. And a look at these 800-square-foot structures shows you the huge variety of possibilities in net zero-energy buildings.
Teams Germany, Spain, and Ontario/BC built sophisticated and relatively expensive homes that used a number of innovative techniques, such as solar cells built into the homes' siding and high-tech heat sinks using "phase-change materials" that retain heat or cold to lower energy use.
Santa Clara University, which came in third in the 2007 competition, teamed up with California College of the Arts, to focus on changing the image of a green home.
"The big idea is that living green is not a compromise. You can have all the amenities of a modern house--you don't need to give up you high-definition TV," said Richard Navarro, an electrical engineering student at Santa Clara University. "If you go into this house, you wouldn't believe that it's just 800 square feet. It feels much bigger."
Many students said they designed buildings that they wanted to see back home. Penn State, for example, used solar collectors that work well with diffuse light and are well suited for their climate. Rice University's Zerow house will be installed as a low-income in Houston and Iowa State designed a home for seniors. The team from the University of Arizona, too, set out to build the "home of the future" tailored for their native state.
IT and building tech
On the technology side, the homes act as a showcase for tried-and-true products but also as test cases for relatively untested green building gear.
Many buildings used well established air-source heat pumps for heating and cooling buildings, which are considered efficient systems. Standard equipment in all these buildings included efficient home appliances and LED lighting, both of which keep the overall electricity demand down. Sensors were put in to automatically turn lighting--or even TVs--on and off.
Some student teams found ways to put cutting-edge products to work. Penn State's solar panels came from California start-up Solyndra, which makes arrays of curved tubes made of thin-film solar cells. Team Illinois worked with a young local company called Lamboo that makes lumber from bamboo--a plant that replenishes quickly. Bamboo is already used for flooring in new buildings, but Lamboo makes structural beams.
Many homes had advanced home-automation control systems, which are widespread in commercial buildings but rarely used in residential buildings. Ohio State, for example, has a system that knows how much power each outlet and appliance in the home is drawing. That data is collected and displayed on a touch screen so people can understand their usage patterns to find ways to be more efficient.
"The touch-screen energy display is not just cool technology. It's also a conservation tool," said Jared Lairmore, a graduate student in architecture at Ohio State.
But for all the focus on high-tech mechanical systems, students clearly also wanted these buildings to be attractive and fit in to their environments, rather than look like a "spaceship," as Kimberly Gould, a civil engineering student at University of Calgary and member of Team Alberta, put it.
A number of buildings used reclaimed materials, including planks from old barns, the core-ten steel used in corn silos, or, in Puerto Rico's case, teak from old wooden benches. Every home had a system to collect rainwater for their gardens, with Team California using a filtering system to clean drain water from the shower and kitchen sink.
"Energy efficiency doesn't mean it's different or not good to look at," said Chad Gallas, a graduate architecture student at the University of Kentucky. "It looks just like a home that could be done anywhere in Kentucky."
After the competition, some homes will be used as test labs or display back home. In the meantime, contestants are hoping to get the most points and share their ideas with the public.
"The way I look at it is we're building a Nascar (race car)," said Mark Taylor, assistant professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We put everything we could in, but you as the public can take what works for you."
The tentative date for the announcement for the overall winner is Friday, October 16. You can see the current standings here.
The University of Minnesota's house on the National Mall.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)First Solar has signed a memorandum of understanding with China to partner on a 2,000-megawatt power plant in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia.
If and when completed, it will be one of the largest solar power plants, perhaps the largest, in the world in terms of megawatts. In comparison to other current projects, the U.S. Army is building a 500-megawatt solar thermal farm in the Mojave Desert. First Solar, which is based in Tempe, Ariz., also has a 550-megawatt project planned in California. And Canadian Solar recently announced a 500-megawatt solar farm also planned for Inner Mongolia.
Ordos City is marked by the red bubble with an "A" inside.
(Credit: Google Maps)Construction on the first phase of the First Solar project in China, a 30-megawatt plant, is set to begin in June 2010. The second phase--at 100 megawatts--and third phase--at 870 megawatts--are scheduled to be completed in 2014. The final fourth phase, a 1,000-megawatt installation, is slated for completion by 2019.
"We are very pleased to be partnering with one of the solar industry's global technology leaders in a project of such significance to Ordos's low carbon future. Discussions with First Solar about building a factory in China demonstrates to investors in China that they can confidently invest in the most advanced technologies available," Cao Zhichen, vice mayor of Ordos City, said in a statement Tuesday.
First Solar manufactures thin-film solar cells from cadmium telluride and builds solar power plants. To accommodate the massive undertaking in China, it will "review the possibility of module and supplier manufacturing sites in Ordos, and other considerations required to support a First Solar investment."
The company also plans to look into recycling used photovoltaic modules in China, something it's already been doing in the U.S.
The Inner Mongolian government has arguably taken a keen interest lately in solar energy. Canadian Solar, a Canadian company with China-based subsidiaries, announced in August that will build a 500-megawatt power plant in Baotou, Inner Mongolia. Ordos City is about 100 miles from Baotou and about 500 miles from Beijing.
The surge in Chinese solar investment is no doubt due in large part to China's $586 billion stimulus package announced in November 2008, which included an estimated $70 billion earmarked for improving the country's electrical grid.
Canadian Solar has been granted rights to develop a 500-megawatt solar power plant in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China, the company announced Wednesday.
Baotou is a manufacturing city on the Yellow River in Inner Mongolia with a population of over 2 million, according to the Chinese government's official Baotou Web site.
Canadian Solar's agreement is with the Administration Committee of Baotou National Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone, also known as its Chinese abbreviation "CPT." The signed agreement includes rights "to design, install, operate, and maintain" the solar power plant in Baotou.
"To have a solar project of such magnitude in Baotou demonstrates our determination to develop the PV end-user market in China, as well as our commitment to cleaner and more sustainable economic development in Baotou," Fu Ren, the committee's director, said in a statement released to the U.S. press.
Canadian Solar, while founded in Canada, has subsidiaries based in China that already manufacture both solar cells and solar panel systems among other things. The Baotou solar project, subject to regulatory approval, will develop in three stages.
Stage one will include the installation of 100 megawatts of photovoltaics between September 2009 and December 2011, followed by two more development phases, each including 200-megawatt installations.
While the installation is massive, this is not the first of its kind. In October 2008, the U.S. Army announced plans to build a 500-megawatt solar thermal power farm in Fort Irwin, Calif. in an effort to reduce its annual energy costs.
And the newly formed Solar Trust was also recently granted rights to to develop the construction and installation of two or three 242-megawatt solar power plants for California that would be operational by 2013 or 2014.
Baotou, a city in Inner Mongolia, China, is about 12 hours northwest of Beijing by train.
(Credit: MultiMap from Bing)
Solar technology in mobile computing devices is still impeded by performance and price issues and isn't likely to entirely replace batteries anytime soon, according to analysts.
James Hines, Gartner's research director for semiconductor, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview that performance is the "primary inhibitor to the practical application of integrated solar cells" in today's mobile devices.
Solar-powered battery chargers for mobile phones and other devices are already available in the market. However, they are not only expensive, but their performance is also "poor," he had said in a recent research document.
Samsung's recently released Crest Solar can generate 5 to 10 minutes of talk time by charging for one hour in sunlight.
(Credit: Samsung)According to Hines, consumer electronics manufacturers are considering integrating solar, or photovoltaic (PV), technologies into more mobile devices.
In June, Samsung launched the Crest Solar (also known as Solar Guru, depending on region), which the Korean mobile maker says has the capacity to provide 5 to 10 minutes of talk time by charging one hour in sunlight. Japanese vendor Sharp also unveiled its Solar Phone SH002 in June, the Nikkei Business Publications reported. And Sanyo released its Eneloop Portable Solar panels for portable device charging earlier this month.
For these applications to be feasible, however, there must be a "significant breakthrough in PV technology" to not only improve energy conversion efficiency but also lower costs, Hines said.
Photovoltaic cells, he explained, currently have a low-energy conversion, while mobile devices increasingly consume more power in active mode. To meet a "significant portion" of the power requirements of full-feature modern mobile devices, the solar panels will have to be larger than the devices, which makes portability more problematic.
"For this reason, products such as the solar-powered mobile phone will probably see limited uptake in the near future," said Hines.
Annette Zimmermann, senior research analyst at Gartner, noted in a document released last month that, "in practice," it takes solar mobiles about a full day to recharge completely. "This will certainly limit the functionality, given that few users have the opportunity to expose their devices openly to the sun for such a long time."
The main selling point of these devices, she added, appears to be the "theoretical convenience for those who do not always have access to electricity," such as in emerging markets. Still, the new technology will most likely have a higher price tag than any low-cost device, which does not match the price expectations of its target market--low-budget users.
Hines added that solar-powered battery chargers for a variety of mobile devices remain the "most practical application in the near-term."
Such battery chargers could even be integrated into backpacks, laptop cases or garments. However, these are a "supplemental" means of charging--in situations where grid connection is not possible or convenient.
Due to their power limitations, integrated solar cells are not likely to replace batteries in mobile electronic devices," said Hines. "Instead, they will be used in conjunction with energy storage devices such as batteries to extend their operating time."
Vivian Yeo of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.
eSolar's demonstration plant in Lancaster, Calif.
(Credit: eSolar)eSolar is doing what so many other solar start-ups wish they were already doing: feeding electricity into the grid.
The 2-year-old concentrating solar company on Wednesday will host an event in Lancaster, Calif., to celebrate the opening of a demonstration facility that's converting the sun's desert heat into electricity.
At five megawatts--enough to supply about 1,500 homes or up to 4,000 during peak hours--it's making a modest contribution to overall electricity generation. But the Lancaster plant has been crucial to proving that eSolar's technology produces cost-effective electricity and can be replicated, said company CEO Bill Gross.
Concentrating solar power systems concentrate sunlight to make steam, which is converted into electricity through a turbine. eSolar's plant is the first to use a single tower to make steam, which is slightly more efficient than traditional reflective trough technology, according to Gross. It uses thousands of computer-controlled mirrors to reflect the light onto the tower.
He said the plant produces power at less than the retail rate for electricity in California, which is 13 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The company has signed deals to supply its technology and projects to energy project developer NRG Energy for plants in the southwest U.S. and ACME in India. Gross said those projects are expected to break ground later this year.
For a full interview with Bill Gross, see this Q&A.
Among the Internet cognoscenti, Bill Gross is best known as the head of tech incubator Idealab. Now, as the CEO of solar start-up eSolar, he's working in renewable energy, but he's still putting his digital economy chops to work.
Two-year-old eSolar is having an opening ceremony for its pilot solar power plant in Lancaster, Calif., on Wednesday. There's a veritable glut of solar start-ups, but eSolar has already gotten further than most: it's actually producing electricity at below the price consumers pay in California.
(Credit:
BillGross.com)
The plant is also the first concentrating solar "power tower" in the U.S., capable of producing five megawatts, or enough power to supply about 1,500 homes or up to 4,000 during peak hours. This emerging utility-scale solar technology uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a tower to make steam, which is then pushed through a turbine to make electricity. The company also has signed deals to build much larger plants in California, New Mexico, and India.
One of the tricks to getting this far, says Gross, is replacing steel with software. In one 46-megawatt eSolar plant, there are 200,000 flat mirrors, each individually controlled by a microprocessor for the optimal angle.
In an interview, Gross predicts that the "more software, less steel" trend will continue in solar, which will help get the cost of solar electricity down. And he says that because banks "are acting like mattresses" rather than lending, other concentrating solar companies will struggle to get utility-scale solar projects off the ground.
Q: Why have you been able to build a demonstration plant in a year while so many others haven't?
Gross: A few reasons. A big one is the land. By using these smaller-piece parcels of land, we don't have to wait for government permission (to use Bureau of Land Management land). We can just use private land. Not to mention we don't have to do environmental impact studies because we're not using pristine desert land, which a lot of people worried about impacting.
The second thing is everybody has to wait for build transmission lines. That could be 10 years or never. You could build a power plant and people could block you from building transmission lines to the main distribution point, so buying land specifically adjacent to transmission helps.
The biggest one, though, is the finance. Most people's projects are billion-dollar projects--they have to be billion-dollar scale before the economics work, and nobody is going to raise a billion dollars in this climate. Our projects work economically at $100 million scale. And we can pay for this plant with cash because we raised $170 million. Everybody else will be held up for years and years until banks will lend on the riskiness of a new project. For us, banks can lend against our project (for new projects) because they can see it works.
Grand opening
There's been a catch-22 on new solar technology--projects can't go forward because they only have a PowerPoint.
In the scheme of things, this plant is just five megawatts (about enough to power 1,500 homes). How do you scale?
Gross: A 46-megawatt plant takes one quarter mile, so to build a gigawatt in California would take 20 of those--or 5 square miles. We purchased that land for $30 million in cash, all in small quarter-mile plots, all adjacent to transmission, so we've completely eliminated the owning and permitting issue.
(Project development companies like) NRG will buy the project from us (for a planned installation in New Mexico) and own and operate the plant for 20 years.
So it's large scale but done in a distributed way?
Gross: Exactly. The ultimate distributed solar is to put (photovoltaic) solar panels on every rooftop. The ultimate centralized solar is get 2,000 acres of BLM land and then you have a transmission problem because you need to build a gigawatt of transmission. We're in between--we're large-scale utility but we're still distributed--distributed in small enough pieces.
Two years ago we didn't know how prescient it would be, but we looked at the entire transmission grid of California and where there was 46 megawatts of available capacity, we would go and buy a patch of land right next to that. We inverted the problem. Others said, "Let's build where the sun is best because I need to buy 2,000 acres at once to get economies of scale. And then I'll try to lobby for 10 years to get 100 miles of million-dollars-per-mile transmission built."
Now environmental groups of all things are protesting people using BLM land, and they have a point. Solar is great but you don't want to destroy the pristine desert...Our land is already being used for something (such as farming).
Precision tracking for each mirror allows eSolar to write the company's name at its Lancaster, Calif., plant.
(Credit: eSolar)On the technology side, how much more productive or efficient is this solar tower than existing solar trough technology?
Gross: It is a little more productive than solar troughs. Solar troughs run at between 27 percent and 30 percent efficiency, and we are at 34 percent efficiency. But the real thing is we're half the cost. It's not the efficiency that we're much better at, it's the price--that's really the breakthrough. The reason we're so much less cost is that we use hundreds of thousands of small flat mirrors, instead of long, long rows of huge curved mirrors. The troughs use a mirror that is 5 meters wide by 100 meters long. They pay the same price as we do for the mirror--it's the same high-quality Belgian or German suppliers--but that's only 10 percent of the cost.
The main cost of the solar thermal plant besides the mirror is the steel and the actuator (for controlling mirrors)--that's 90 percent of the cost...The steel (is needed) to hold the mirror in shape without distorting, to stay in a perfect parabola. Because we use a one-square-meter mirror, we use half the steel. Imagine if you take a piece of flat glass and put a tripod behind it, it'll stay flat. But you need far more steel to bend glass against its will.
So why haven't other solar companies broken up their mirrored troughs into smaller bits?
Gross: The problem is historically it's been a software control problem to track hundreds of thousands of small things. The benefit of one big row is you only need 20 motors to turn troughs--all pointing at the sun--and software control is trivial. We have 24,000 individual mirrors, all pointing in slightly different directions to point at one spot. We're basically making a dynamic parabola in software where they are making a static parabola in steel.
In the last decade, there's been a 1,000-fold increase in computational power, so now we can put a $2 microprocessor in every mirror and it costs almost nothing--almost one and half percent of the (material) cost. So every mirror that is tracking the sun during the day has its own computer. And the computational power of a microprocessor today is mind-boggling. It's a 16-bit microprocessor with eight I/O ports. It's like an IBM AT (PC) in every mirror--that was a $5,000 computer in 1985. This completely wouldn't be possible without Moore's Law.
It's interesting that you've come from the computer world into solar. Will there be other stories like eSolar to come?
Gross: I definitely think so. eSolar has been grown right in the same building as other Idealab companies with all the benefits of IT they had--it uses all the servers built for Internet companies with all the experience and hardening capabilities. And it even uses many of software developers from prior years that we've hired back from places like Yahoo.
If anything, we're more a software company than a solar company. Of course we're a solar company, but software is 50 people out of the whole company. There are 135 people--100 are in engineering, 35 are out running power plants, so half the (engineering people) are in the software group, which is an amazing percentage for a solar company.
A view of the mirrors on eSolar's Lancaster, California plant.
(Credit: eSolar)The reason that this going to happen more is that, of course, every commodity in the world is going up over time. There will be blips like we're having now, but in general, the cost of things that require natural resources will go up. The only thing going down is computation power. Everything else behaves on a different law--one of scarcity.
Computing costs are going down. If you want to crack a problem where cost is the issue, you gotta bet on the thing going down in price and include more of that. Less steel, more software--that is the right trade you want to make. I think that's going to be used more and more.
Are you optimistic on solar and green tech in general?
Gross: I'm wildly optimistic about it, and we only have this momentary setback due to the recession and the banking industry. But this is going to be a 100-year-long build-out to replicate what we built out with coal and natural gas in the last century. The only way it's going to happen is if you actually lower the price--it's not going to happen through altruism. If you can beat natural gas and coal, then you'll have access to huge, huge markets. If you don't, then you'll be limited to the subsidized market. (eSolar's projects benefit from a 30 percent federal tax credit).
How did you start getting into energy after working in the Internet?
Gross: I have been interested in energy all my life, ever since I was a teenager. I worked on energy projects back in 1973 during the first energy crisis, called Solar Devices, a mail-order business I ran as a teenager. I think I got into Caltech because of that business--I wrote about it in my application. But then OPEC came along, formed, and colluded to drive down the price of oil so that at end of the '70s, nobody was interested in renewable energy anymore. So I had a 20-year hiatus in software and Internet companies and had a string of successes that enabled me to have the capital to come back to my true love in 2000. And of course, by 2000 people were talking about energy issues, maybe running out of energy. That's when we did the research that led to this crop of solar companies (covering different solar markets such as rooftop solar and off-grid solar) over the last nine years.
Updated at 6:30 a.m. PT with corrected figures for the number of mirrors.
After a six-year effort, the prototype of a new solar-powered aircraft was unveiled at a Swiss airfield on Friday by its future pilots and promoters Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg.
Dubbed the Solar Impluse HB-SIA, the airplane is designed to fly both day and night without the need for fuel and will begin test flights by year's end.
Despite a wingspan equal to that of a Boeing 747, the Solar Impulse weighs only around 1.7 tons, about the same as an average car. More than 12,000 solar cells mounted on the wing supply renewable solar energy to the four 10-horsepower electric motors. During the day, the solar panels charge the plane's lithium polymer batteries, allowing it to fly at night.
At a press conference at the plane's Duebendorf airfield near Zurich, Piccard made clear the goal of the aircraft is to prove the business viability and profitability of renewable energy.
"If an aircraft is able to fly day and night without fuel, propelled solely by solar energy, let no one come and claim that is impossible to do the same thing for motor vehicles, heating and air conditioning systems ,and computers," Piccard said.
After this year's initial test flight, a night flight is scheduled for 2010 to see if the plane can stay in the air for 36 hours.
On the horizon in 2012, Piccard and Borschberg plan to fly the next generation of the Solar Impulse, the HB-SIB, around the world in five legs over the course of four to six days. That will make another global trip for adventurer Piccard, who in 1990 piloted the first round-the-world hot-air balloon flight with his Orbiter 3.
"Through this project we are proclaiming our conviction that a pioneering spirit and political vision can together change society and put an end to fossil fuel dependency," said Piccard.
The Solar Impulse joins the ranks of other solar-powered airplanes, including Qinetiq's Zephyr and NASA's Helios.
An unmanned aerial vehicle that's intended to use a combination of solar power and stored electricity is being developed by Ascent Solar Technologies and Bye Aerospace, both companies announced Tuesday.
(Credit:
Bye Aerospace)
Ascent Solar will be supplying flexible thin-film photovoltaic modules designed for Bye's drone, the Silent Sentinel.
Bye will be using a Williams International FJ33 turbofan engine that will draw power from stored electrical power in a lithium-ion battery and the photovoltaic panels on the plane.
The result will be a quiet, low-emission hybrid UAV with added endurance, according to Bye.
The Silent Sentinel is intended for military surveillance purposes, but could also be used in the commercial world for things like pipeline and power line inspection, forest fire watch, and aerial photography.
While Bye said it has had proposal meetings with U.S. government officials, no contract for the vehicle has yet been signed with the U.S. military.
Bye will not be the first to combine solar panels with a drone-type aircraft. British defense contractor Qinetiq built and tested the Zephyr, a 66-pound glider that flew an unofficial record 54 hours straight (according to Qinetiq's own report) over White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in 2007. In early 2008, DARPA announced it was developing the Vulture, a solar-powered aircraft that would "fly" for 5 years straight, though arguably that UAV could be considered more of a satellite in orbit.
