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.
SolFocus, a solar technology company that was incubated at the Palo Alto Research Center (now an offshoot of Xerox), has raised $52 million more dollars to help it launch in Europe.
The company, which had previously raised $27 million, specializes in solar concentrators, which direct more sunlight onto solar cells that would ordinarily fall on them. The more sunlight, the more electricity the solar cell can generate. The more electricity a cell can generate, the more economical solar energy--which generally still costs about twice as much as regular grid power--becomes.
SolFocus' concentrators magnify the light 500 times. Several companies make solar concentrators, and SolFocus' figures are in the general ballpark of efficiency. Some, such as GreenVolts, claim higher efficiency, but others sport lower. Buyers, though, are also concerned about durability and maintenance. Concentrators move with the sun to maximize output.
The company's products are aimed at the commercial market, such as retail stores or office parks. Placed on a roof, solar concentrators can cool off a building and generate power on-site. SolFocus also intends to build large-scale power generation, where a field of panels could generate several hundred megawatts of power.
SolFocus Europe will concentrate on the European market, which is larger than the U.S. solar market. The company will also start to develop products for the solar thermal market. In solar thermal technology, heat from the sun is converted to electricity. SolFocus' original products work with photovoltaic panels, which convert light to electricity.
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