Eric Wesoff | September 4, 2008 at 6:09 AM 3 Comments

CPV, Pt. 2: Low-Concentration Photovoltaics

Dividing up the CPV market by high versus low concentration is convenient for your humble analyst but perhaps not wholly accurate. Some have suggested that parsing it by application would be more revealing.

This makes sense since there are High-Concentration Photovoltaic (HCPV) and Low-Concentration Photovoltaics (LCPV) firms pursuing the rooftop (contrary to the Prometheus chart below), while HCPV firm GreenVolts or SolFocus and LCPV firm Skyline pursue community and utility-scale. Hey, it’s an evolving market and I’m an evolving analyst.

I covered HCPV systems in Part One. Part Two follows and covers LCPV. Part Three will cover the III/V solar cells that perform the actual power conversion.

Our real question remains – where does CPV fit in the scheme of things? Can it bring power to market and compete with CST and silicon PV? Many CPV companies were founded with the specter of looming silicon shortages and rising silicon prices as their justifier. Now, with a forecasted oversupply of silicon and prices reaching equilibrium, does the value proposition for CPV still exist?

“Questioning the market potential for CPV is justified based on the lack of large scale deployments, but does not reflect a lack of market opportunity,â€? said Bob Macdonald, Skyline Solar’s CEO. “CPV technologies primarily compete in systems larger than residential and smaller than central station power – in sunny climates. There’s little doubt that this market (commercial, industrial, free field) is large and growing rapidly. The bottleneck for CPV to date comes down to execution. Any company that delivers a lower cost ($/kWh will be more important than $/W) solution will find enough customers to maximize their production line and supply chain.â€?

Daniel Englander, Greentech Media’s intrepid analyst chimes in:

The reason why CPV is relegated to the mid-sized commercial market is that it fits the bill of both modularity and scalability. PV, c-Si specifically – makes sense on a distributed residential scale because of installation costs. Solar thermal needs to reach the planned maximum plant capacity before the entire system can come online and begin producing. CPV sits in the middle. Installing a single 30-kW dish doesn’t justify the cost because the power produced isn’t that great, while installing a massive system can’t compete on capital cost with utility-scale CPV. So there’s this idea of minimum economic scale, which is assumed to sit around 10 MW - and that might increase as prices come down. The problem with CPV is that it’s responsive to cost issues of both PV and CST – you need a lot of steel and cement to install a CPV plant, but you also need to worry about the cost of III-IV or gallium arsenide panels.

Also, because these are precision devices, O&M as expressed in $/kWh may actually increase over the life of the plant, as compared with PV, which means that other cap costs need to come down as a function of scale. The problem is that because the PV panel is a primary cost driver, that component is more responsive to panel pricing than scale pricing.

Mr. Englander adds, “CPV/CST is most effective in deserts, typically on public land or low-value private land, so land lease pricing is only a small part of CPV LCOE.�

LCPV Firms: Tracking and Non-Tracking

Covalent Solar: Covalent is an early stage, pre-VC firm spawned from MIT targeting a dye-based luminescent solar concentrator without tracking or cooling.  The system looks to use both triple junction and silicon cells and could have eventual BIPV applications.

JX Crystals: 3X tracking systems using metal mirrors. Here are some test results. They have deployed a few 100kW so far.

Netcrystal: According to their SBIR award, Netcrystal aims to enhance the development of high-efficiency, lightweight microconcentrator photovoltaic arrays based on stretched silicon technology developed at Stanford University. VC funding received from X/Seed, Siemens and Wellington Partners with another round imminent.

Prism Solar: Prism Solar uses transparent holographic optical elements in its passive concentrator design.

Pythagoras Solar: Israel-based Pythagoras has received VC funding from Pitango, Evergreen, Precede and Israel Cleantech Ventures.

Skyline Solar: Stealth-mode LCPV vendor is targeting large installations (as opposed to residential applications). It is using tracking systems engineered by Lauritzen. The company claims its product “combines the best of thin film (low area cost) and silicon PV (high reliability and efficiency).�  Skyline’s CEO provided the following tidbits:

• They are commercializing a “high utilization” silicon PV system (more Watts per wafer)

• Their technology is based on linear concentration with a strong kinship to CST

• They are targeting commercial, industrial and utility markets

SolBeam: With seed funding from NGEN, Solabeam is building flat panel concentrators. Here’s a SolBeam patent.

Solaria: With considerable funding from Q-Cells, Sigma Partners, NGEN and Moser Baer, Solaria is building a low concentration system in the traditional flat-panel footprint.

“Our focus in the last three years has been on a specific automation process,� said CEO Suvi Sharma.

Solaria’s technology is based on dicing or “singulating� a standard silicon wafer and mounting these strips on a substrate with a lensing system that essentially halves the requirement for silicon. Its 25-MW line in the Philippines will be ready for production by the end of this year and follows a fabless model by using a third party operator. Solaria has about 65 employees in the U.S. and 15 in the Philippines. “We have real deployments, real beta products, and real customers,� said Sharma.

SV Solar: VC-funded start-up with a $10 million round A led by Bessemer Venture Partners and presumably sourced by Justin Label, BVP’s cleantech partner. The company calls its product a “flat plate internal concentrator solar module,� and is using an “Asymmetric, linear focus optic with 2-3X geometric concentration.� SV has recently moved into a 15,000 sq. ft. headquarters/pilot production facility in Sunnyvale, Calif. and have begun producing early test samples on its pilot line.

Stellaris: Funded by King Hill Capital, Convexa Capital and iEnergies with a $6 million Round A in 2007, Stellaris builds non-tracking LCPV with technology stemming from the Northeast Solar Energy Center. Here’s a link to Stellaris’ solar patent.

Zytech: Private firm headquartered in Spain manufacturing LCPV and HCPV.

Click here to continue to Part Three: Solar Cells for High-Concentration Photovoltaics.