Bloggage From SPI, Part 2: A Hopeful CPV Panel

I moderated a panel on Tuesday on Concentrating Photovoltaics (CPV) at the Solar Power International show in Anaheim.

I am an unlikely choice for the CPV moderator role as I have not always heaped praise on the CPV industry (see here and here). 

But I kept an open mind, and our panel explored the progress that CPV has made and the challenges that lie ahead.

Our panelists:

• Hansjörg Lerchenmüller, CEO, Concentrix Solar  

• Mark Crowley, President and CEO, SolFocus 

• Joseph Budano, CEO, Energy Innovations   

• Jerry Bloom, Partner and Chair, Energy Practice at Winston & Strawn  

Jerry Bloom, a longtime energy and renewables attorney at Winston served as a reality check – reminding us that solar competes with 4 cent per kilowatt hour coal and cheap nuclear power. And that renewables face an uphill battle in making inroads in the dominant energy energy mix.

But the CEOs of these CPV firms, selected for this panel because they are on the cusp of full-scale commercialization, are driven and optimistic and they made these points:

• CPV is just at the beginning of its cost curve.  Concentrix' Lerchenmüller sees CPV achieving costs of 30 cents per Watt in a few years.

• CPV with high-efficiency triple-junction solar cells behaves better than silicon in high temperatures.

• CPV doesn't require water like CSP and unlike CSP scales to smaller deployments.

• Notably, the price of capex for CPV is much less than that of other PV technologies: $0.10 to $0.15 per Watt compared to First Solar at about $1 per Watt and a-Si at about $3 per Watt.

• CPV, at least for these three firms, is becoming a "bankable" and credible technology.

NREL CPV expert Sarah Kurtz noted that the anticipated timeline for CPV has been far exceeded with Energy Innovations and the company's 1200 sun system claims a module efficiency of 29 percent. 

All of the CEOs expected the prices of the solar cells to drop. Lerchenmüller spoke of the parallel between those cells, which are essentially LEDs, having to follow the falling price trajectory of LEDs whether they come from Emcore, Spectra, Azure Space or one of the newcomers like Cyrium or Solar Junction.

And impressively, between the three CPV firms on the panel – there is the potential for almost 100 megawatts of factory capacity within the next year.

These firms still face the competitive challenge of plunging silicon costs and the difficult financing environment.   But, of the more than 45 VC-funded CPV firms, many of them doomed, these three hardy firms have a decent chance of surviving and succeeding.