Eric Wesoff | September 11, 2008 at 4:35 AM 6 Comments

CPV, Pt. 4: Concentrated Photovoltaic Poetry Corner With Sunrgi

There are about 25 VC-funded firms in the Concentrated Photovoltaic market.  We listed all of them in CPV Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

Only a few of them, maybe 10 percent, will survive to win market share and perhaps be acquired or go public. That means at least 20 of those companies are doomed. Most will create pretty Websites, make outrageous claims, oxidize their investor’s money and waste journalists’ time.

Which brings us to my interview with Sunrgi.

Sunrgi is building a CPV system with a claimed 2000X concentration. The system has “built-in� 2-axis tracking and is produced in 1kW blocks that integrate like Lego-blocks™.� Greentech Media’s Rachel Barron reported on the firm earlier this year. We’ll talk more about technology in a bit.

First, let’s talk about their team:

Dr. KRS Murthy is one of the founding partners of Sunrgi and is something like their CTO. Here’s his resume. He’s evidently a child prodigy, a poet, accomplished actor, graduated high school at the age of 12, and is also a musician and composer. Here’s a page where he does unspeakable things to Beethoven and many other musical genres. He is able to take any piece of music and transform it into the same unlistenable song. Perfect qualifications for the CTO of a CPV company.

Here’s an excerpt from one his poems:

She asked him
How long?
How big?
How strong?
How firm?

More:

What does future hold 
for the baby we just made?
Turbo love?
Drive-in romance?
Takeout love lunch?
Nanosecond orgasms?
Strobe light love affairs,
can hypnotize gene welding,
we just enjoyed.

And here’s another excerpt:

I remember the times my mind vomited eruptions of stinking gooey green liquid
 every time I remembered how you made me feel by rejecting me on my rainy days.

Paul Sidlo is another founding partner of the laugh riot that is Sunrgi. According to his resume, he is one of the pioneers in the field of computer graphics, has earned numerous awards including nine Emmys and is the principal of a firm that is the broker for sponsorship and advertising of the Las Vegas Monorail. Another perfect employee to develop a CPV system.

You can read about the other team members here. What they seem to have in common is little or no experience in solar power, energy technology or the utility business. Which frees them from the mental constraints of having actual real world experience in this market.

The following includes some quotes from the founders that speak for themselves

Greentech Media and the Prometheus Institute projected that the CPV market will be about 6 GW by 2020 (It’s only a few Megawatts today). The Emmy Award-winning Paul Sidlo said: “That’s absolutely wrong, I get a call for 6GW of power orders in a week!� He claims the market will be at least four times that figure and that Sunrgi has, “1kw to 1GW capability.�

Dr. Murthy said that, “There are three things that distinguish Sunrgi – cost, space, and time.� He claims Sunrgi can achieve “5 cents per kWh� in the Southwestern U.S., that the company only needs “1.5 acres of land to generate 1.5MW� and that Sunrgi “can deploy 100MW in 100 days.�

Bob Block, another founder claims that they can become “a global company almost overnight,� because of their use of subscontractors and a “technology that can be manufactured on a standard PCB line.�

Don’t these guys realize that I’m writing down the things that they say?

Anyway, rather than solely trust my own instincts and the deafening roar of my bullshit detector, I asked some experts in the field – people at the DOE, CEOs at other CPV firms, researchers and academics. Here are some comments that seem to confirm my skepticism:

“Yes, 2000X is probably possible, but why would you want to do it?  It’s pretty likely to be more costly than a lower-X solution,� said a technologist and CPV company founder.

He added that Spectrolab and Emcore both do not advise operating the cells above 1000X. It has something to do with tunnel junctions. Basically, if the cell is not built and/or illuminated uniformly, two things can happen: Hot spots can develop, leading to thermal runaway; and parasitic tunnel junctions can eat current, leading to reduced efficiency.

Above about 750X, the cost of a receiver assembly is dominated by things that aren’t the cell – thermal substrate, die attach, optical secondary, bond wires, heat sink, grounding wire (required by UL), leads and cell-to-cell interconnect, labor, etc. Further reduction in overall cost by reducing the cell size further becomes pretty minimal, whereas you’re making other things a good bit harder, and cost will very likely go up.

As the cost of the cells drops in the future (e.g., as the vendors move from 4-inch to 6-inch fabs), the money saved by going to very high concentration will become even less.

And to summarize the whole thing: Yes, I think Sunrgi can pull off 2000X, but it will be more costly than a lower-X design, and it’s unlikely that the cells will perform well at that concentration ratio, so it’s a double-whammy against them.

Who cares if they’re 2000X? I would say if they, in their heart of hearts, really think that 2000X is their crown jewel, then they are lost in the wilderness. If 2000X is just a banner to attract funding and talented staff, then it may serve them well.

This gentleman had more to add about pointing and cooling that seemed to cast doubt on Sunrgi’s claims.

According to a colleague affiliated with the DOE, There is no evidence that [2000X] can be done thermally, [with accurate] tracking or at low cost.

These are amongst the kinder comments I received.

The odds are against any early-stage startup. That’s borne out by history.

Not having a real technology or appropriate domain experience further stacks the deck against bubble-market startups like Sunrgi.

Click here to continue to Part Four: More VC Funding in CPV.