Half a year ago, I
diaried about the new wave of solar power devices which concentrate sunlight onto solar cells to get more power out of them.
The solar panel market seems to have priced in the silicon feedstock shortage, and panel prices will likely coast downwards from now on (inflation adjusted.) Also the non-silicon technologies seem to be gearing up for mass production.
However a mirror or lens will likely remain cheaper per square foot than the cells themselves for quite some time. So let's check in with this market and see what has happenned in the last six months.
Fremont, California's Pacific SolarTech remains the only US company (that I could find) selling their product as a non-turnkey solution. The
MicroPV is an active-tracking panel with an efficiency (per square meter) of about 10%. Unfortunately they do not publish prices online.
In Australia, Green and Gold Energy's SunBall has given way to the SunCube and being as they are pretty much the only company to publicly publish their prices online, we can see they seem to running in the US$2/Wp to US$3/Wp range, (versus $4/Wp for non-concentrated panels, for comparison.)
In Lowell, Massachusetts Stellaris's Clear Power product is being sold in turnkey systems. It is a passive tracking system using a trough lense arrangement, and touts the unique ability to be used in building-integrated translucent glazing -- that is, windows and skylights that produce electricity. As the system seems only to be sold in "project" form deducing the price per watt is not possible -- but the systems are being sold on a pilot basis at least -- they claim to have pulled down a $200k contract since my last diary.
At first appearing to be late to the party, Palo Alto, California's SolFocus has managed to quickly pull in a lot of VC cash and announced a contract to obtain a rather large quantity of solar cells for commercialization of their as-yet unnamed product, which uses course active tracking.
Pasadena, California (IdeaLab) Energy Innovations has posted a few more photos of their Sunflower 250 in test installations, but had better hurry if they plan to make good on their claim to be ready to ship this year. They are being very quiet. It is a low-profile system for flat-top commercial roofs with an interesting multi-mirror active tracking collector -- looks sort of like an overhead projector.
In Stone Ridge, New York, Prism Solar's visually stunning rainbow-producing holographic panels may not be suitable for all in-window solar tasks, and does not concentrate much compared to many of the other products, but will be favored among BIPV vendors nonetheless; it's a passive tracking system.
In Halfmoon, New York DayStar's ConcentraTIR product seems, at least judging from lack of press releases, to still be languishing on the shelf -- though it is quite possible behind the scenes something is hapenning. It is more likely for a third party to integrate this technology from DayStar than for DayStar to sell it directly, since their primary product initiatives are in CIGS solar cells.
And now the newcomers to my diary:
San Francisco, California's GreenVolts is playing things close to the vest. Though they recently won the California Clean Tech Open. Information on their product is hard to come by.
La Jolla, California Pyron Solar seems most interested in the solar farm market rather than buildings or homes. They produce a flat profile concentrator tracked by rotation, using a system of lenses and mirrors based on old telescope technology, and claim a high efficiency in the Watts-per-square-meter metric.
Fremont, California based Solaria recently pulled in a large amount of VC money, but their product is being kept under wraps.
Canadian company Menova is taking a more traditional-looking approach in scaling what we see on solar trough farms down to a consumer-friendly size. Their Power-spar product can be used for either thermal or photovoltaic collection.
As a sidenote, an ongoing project to use concentrators on satellites deserves a link. Also, scientists are looking at the human tooth, more specifically dentin for clues on how to fabricate concentrator systems directly on top of solar cells, though mainly just in order to make them track passively, not magnify the light.
Things also seem to be moving along on the solar thermal, solid-state thermoelectric, and thermophotovoltaic fronts, but as those are less likely to be in end-consumer products anytime soon, I'll save that for another diary.
(UPDATE: just to drop in a link to another new entry: Practical Instruments's Heliotube appears to be similar to an earlier shelved design at EnergyInnovations, except using just a parabolic trough mirror instead of a fresnel/mirror combo.)