GreenVolts, which is commercializing technology from the national labs to better concentrate sunlight, has received $10 million in funding.
The company, based out of San Francisco, has a concentrating system for photovoltaic panels that effectively lets its put the power of 625 suns onto a solar panel. The high concentration levels thus allow it to shrink the real estate required for a single power plant. As a result, the power plants can be built closer to the consumers--i.e. people living in the city or suburbs--which in turn cuts down the cost of transmission lines.
Several other companies are working on concentrators for photovoltaic panels and some have received far more money. SolFocus, which can bring you the power of 500 suns, has raised $52 million. The GreenVolts concentrator is more efficient, the company claims, because it casts minimal shadows onto the solar panels, among other reasons. The concentrator also rotates with the sun. Greenvolts licenses its basic technology from the national labs.
The company has a contract to build a two megawatt facility in Tracy, California for Pacific Gas & Electric by the fourth quarter of next year.
GreenVolts? Series A round of funding was led by Greenlight Energy Resources and included Avista, a solar company.
GreenVolts CEO Bob Cart came up with the idea of going into the solar biz after sailing around the South Pacific. There, he helped locals fix solar panels discarded by sailors who had passed through earlier. Distributed power sort of struck him as an interesting opportunity.
High-end solar technology isn't just for power plants and commercial rooftops. It also works in parking lots.
Soliant Energy is a start-up doing concentrating photovoltaic systems, which uses a series of mirrored tubes to magnify sunlight onto solar cells to boost electricity. (For an FAQ and photo gallery on concentrating PV, see this article.)
Soliant's heliotubes: Coming to a car park soon.
(Credit: Soliant Energy)"One thing we realized about a year ago was that we could make very large panels, which is something that ordinary solar panels can't do," said company CEO Brad Hines.
The company's traditional "heliotube" concentrator, which is meant to be the same size as traditional solar panels, has 10 tubes that shine light onto solar cells.
To make a product to shade cars it used the same basic design, but by stringing together 16 tubes, Soliant makes the panel a little over 8 feet long, said Hines. The company is planning to ship its commercial products by the end of this year.
SolFocus, which builds high-end solar-power systems, on Wednesday said it has acquired Madrid, Spain-based Inspira, a provider of specialized sun "trackers," for an undisclosed price.
A spin-off from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, SolFocus builds solar concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) arrays that use several small mirrored dishes to magnify sunlight hundreds of times to get more electricity from high-efficiency solar cells.
SolFocus' concentrating photovoltaic arrays.
(Credit: SolFocus)Inspira will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SolFocus and continue to make products for both markets, said Nancy Hartsoch, SolFocus' vice president of marketing.
SolFocus already uses Inspira's trackers and its arrays. By bringing SolFocus' expertise in manufacturing at the large scale to Inspira's product line, the company hopes to bring down the cost of the trackers, Hartsoch said.
"Tracker technology with concentrator photovoltaics is integral to how well the system performs and integral to bringing the cost down. It's in our best interest to bring tracker cost down--and it benefits the entire CPV industry as a whole," she said.
SolFocus, which raised $32 million in a series A round of funding, is testing its concentrator photovoltaic arrays this year and plans to have commercially available products next year. The target applications are large commercial solar installations or midsize power plants.
GreenVolts, which builds utility solar power plants that feature high-performance concentrators, has signed a deal with Pacific Gas & Electric to build a 2-megawatt solar power plant near Tracy, Calif., in 2008.
When built, it will be the largest concentrator solar plant for utilities in the world.
In Germany, utility solar power plants--which essentially are large numbers of solar panels sitting in a field or on top of a roof--are a big deal. That's because the government subsidizes them. Sellers get 45 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity they send to the grid, far higher than the normal price. Farmers are ripping up pastures to erect solar plants.
In the U.S. the benefits aren't as great. Thus, most solar panels are sold to individuals, who put them on their roofs. In some states, however, utilities are required to start getting more of their energy from renewable resources. PG&E has a mandate to get 20 percent of its power from renewable resources by 2010. Hence, PG&E wants to build its own solar fields. (Las Vegas has strong mandates too.)
GreenVolts will try to stand out of the crowd with its concentrator, which was originally developed at the national labs. By concentrating vastly more sunlight onto the solar cell than would shine on it in ordinary circumstances, an individual solar cell can generate more electricity than they would in normal circumstances. According to Bob Cart, the light that his company's concentrator can deliver to a cell is the same amount that the cell would get if there were 625 suns in the sky.
The technology also has sort of a nice "Conan the Destroyer" ring to it. It could also be good for Tracy's image. The town has previously been associated with the Altamont concert and a large tire fire.
The Electric Power Research Institute has also kicked off research into the feasibility of building large--like 500 megawatts large--solar plants with concentrators.
The solar panels also rotate on what GreenVolts calls the CarouSol. There's no shortage of puns in the solar world.
Cool Earth Solar is banking on solar power priced more like a bicycle than a Mercedes.
The Livermore, Calif.-based company, which is still officially in stealth mode, has raised $750,000 in capital with a goal of raising a total of $950,000 to build a prototype, according to founder Eric Cummings. Announcements of board members and executives will be coming in June, he said.
Cummings has taken a radically inexpensive approach to solar power generation, taking into account land use issues as well.
His product design calls for hoisting several connected plastic balloons, referred to as "inflatable solar concentrators," to generate electricity on solar farms.
These balloon-shaped solar collectors (see presentation PDF file for diagram) use plastics to reflect light onto photovoltaic panels to generate power.
The technique of concentration is being actively pursued by several companies because it allows solar devices to squeeze more electricity from expensive solar cells.
Cool Earth Solar says its solar collectors, which are about two meters in diameter, will be cheaper than other concentrators because of the inexpensive plastic it will use to magnify light. Typically, concentrators use sophisticated lenses or polished aluminum.
Cummings envisions that these balloons will be cabled together above farmland and would be replaced every year. That's a radical notion in the solar industry where providers typically warranty panels for 20 or 25 years.
By placing the concentrators above farms and other rural areas, the sun can be put to work generating electricity at a large scale without taking up huge tracts of land, according to Cummings. The design calls for the PV "receiver" to be cooled by circulating water.
Cummings says that his "phase 2" design deployed at large-scale farms will be able to generate electricity at 29 cents per watt. That's far below the industry benchmark, usually measured at $5 to $7 per watt.
Cool Earth Solar, like many green technology companies, is trying out new ideas or recycling abandoned ones to build a business. (See stories on Planktos and Magenn Power for other examples of "out of the box" green tech thinking.)
As with many of these early stage companies, investors and potential buyers will be tracking how well Cool Earth Solar's cost-per-watt projections match with initial tests.
AUSTIN, Texas--If you can't get the sun to the solar cell, bring the cell to the sun.
That's one of the ideas behind SolBeam, a company that pitched to investors at the Clean Energy Venture Summit here on Tuesday.
The company, which is looking to raise $10 million, is trying to exploit the technique of concentrating sunlight to increase the electricity output of photovoltaic (PV) material. But it wants to break with traditional practices to lower power generation costs, said Daniel Colbert, the CEO of SolBeam who is also a venture capitalist at NGEN Partners.
Many large-scale concentrators place focusing lenses directly above photovoltaic material. These concentrators are typically mounted on poles or another structure so they can move during the course of the day to ensure maximum light intake.
SolBeam's design calls for decoupling the lens from the PV material. Another difference from typical concentrators is that SolBeam plans to have a flat panel.
The company envisions a few different configurations. After his presentation, Colbert described the basic design.
There will be a rectangular box that will hold the lenses that concentrate the light. Underneath that is an array that holds the photovoltaic material. To maximize the light on the array, there are two motors, or actuators, that move the PV to the optimal position, he said.
This mechanically controlled version will be the most cost-effective of SolBeam's anticipated products, delivering electricity at 15 cents per kilowatt, he said.
Other designs call for "steering" the light to hit the PV at the optimal angle.
The company has already received seed funding.
AUSTIN, Texas--When most people think of solar energy they think of panels on people's homes. But if you follow the money, investors are betting that large-scale solar from companies like Ausra are the most cost-competitive.
Ausra, which presented at the Clean Energy Venture Summit here on Tuesday, is testing a system to generate power at centralized stations. These solar parks use concentrating solar power to create steam that turns a turbine to make electricity.
If constructed on a large enough scale,these solar thermal plants are already cost-effective when compared with fossil-fuel power generation, according to advocates of the approach. (See photo of another concentrating solar plant here.)
Ausra's twist is "thermal storage." In addition to generating steam from its array of special metal tubes, Ausra stores hot water that a power plant can draw on during times when the sun is not shining.
That thermal storage is key to competing on price even at peak demand times, said Robert Morgan, the chief development officer of Ausra, who spoke on Tuesday.
The company's system, which is now testing in Australia, can operate at 10 cents per kilowatt hour for plants between 100 and 200 megawatts. For plants between 100 and 500 megawatts, the cost goes down to 8 cents per kilowatt hour, said Morgan
That means they can compete with existing natural gas plants, which operate at 12 cents per kilowatt hour, he said.
"With thermal storage, we can compete with coal on price," he said. Coal-fueled plants are typically the cheapest sources of power.
Ausra, which has been relatively quiet about its plans until now, is backed by venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures.
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