One problem with solar power farms are the massive expanse of land they require. That’s why a crop of companies developing “concentrator” technologies are getting financial backing lately.
These companies use mirrors and other techniques to concentrate the sun on solar cells, which boosts the conversion to electricity.
The latest is GreenVolts, a San Francisco company that says it can concentrate “625 suns of energy onto a highly efficient solar cell,” and which helps it avoid using large tracts of land. The company has just raised $10 million in a first round of venture financing. We’ve covered the company twice before (see here and here), when it raised about $1.5 million in seed funding.
Other solar concentration companies include Silicon Valley Solar (see coverage), which also raised $10 million in June, and SolFocus (see coverage), a company that created a significant bidding war among investors last year, and has already raised a significant $84 million. Solaria of Fremont, Calif., a third player, recently raised $50 million in a third round of funding from Germany’s solar cell company Q-Cells.
We’ve reported Greenvolt’s plans to build a 2-megawatt solar electricity plant for PG&E outside of Tracy, Calif. The company said the plant is on track for opening late next year.
The funding was led by Greenlight Energy Resources, an operator of renewable energy projects. It included Avista Corporation and other unnamed investors.
5 Comments
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Dave said:
The sun has to hit the earth first before it can be concentrated so I fail to see how this will result in lower land use.
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ruckrover said:
Dave, that’s not a very smart comment - concentration of light is presumably due to reflection. Try lighting a candle in a dark room - then next time light the same candle in a room full of mirrors - notice the difference!
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Dave said:
You can’t increase the amount of energy that hits the earth over a given area. Your options are to capture the light where it hits, i.e. like your typical PV array or focus it on a single point using mirrors and then capture it. The difference is not in the amount of land used but if it cheaper to use relatively cheaper mirrors and a more expensive collector vs a PV panels which would be cheaper than their collector but more expensive than a mirror.
Lighting a candle in a room of mirrors doesn’t create more light. It may distribute it more evenly, but that is all it does. -
andrew said:
You can use cells that are more than twice as efficient which means half the land use.
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Dave said:
This is obviously true but this is not what the company claims. I believe it is the author or the article that placed emphasis on reducing land use via concentrator technology not GreenVolt. GreenVolt’s only claim to be able to save space is by the virtue of their mounting/tracking system allowing the units to be mounted closer together.
PV typically operate at efficiencies that are inversely proportional to temperature and concentrating the sun my a magnification of 625 is bound to raise temperature. Their technology may be great and cost half of their competition as they claim but it won’t significantly reduce the amount of land required which was the theme of the article.
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Sunrgi claims bargain-basement power prices from new solar concentrator design » VentureBeat said:
[...] on a single point (by comparison, one of the previous biggest claims for concentration levels was Greenvolts’ 625 suns). For an idea of how this might work, try to think of the most ingenious way possible to torch ants [...]