CPV Update: NREL, Solar Junction, GreenVolts, etc.

Developments in the zero billion-dollar concentrating photovoltaic market

NREL's Sarah Kurtz has updated her Concentrating Photovoltaics report. The pdf is downloadable here



Sarah is always the optimist about CPV.  According to the report:



The high-concentration PV industry has made great strides in the last year, including:

Si-based CPV approaches are also making significant strides:



On the other hand, Ed Gunther of the Gunther Portfolio had this to say about his rosy prediction of a 30 MWp plus HCPV project deal in 2009 -- Grade: Fail.

Ed goes on to say that SolFocus is still struggling with environmental permitting issues for the Samaras Group CPV Project in Greece and that the largest HCPV project completed in 2009 was a 1 megawatt solar power plant in Taiwan.  He prophesied that at least 30 to 50 megawatts-peak of HCPV must be installed in 2010, or "HCPV is destined to remain Eric Wesoff’s pet zero billion-dollar market."  That's me, quoting Ed, quoting me.



CPV Personnel

Low concentration solar vendor, Solaria, made the big hire of landing Daniel Shugar, formerly of SunPower.  We reported on that here.   Here's an older piece on the challenge of being a CPV company CEO.



GreenVolts' new CEO David Gudmundson (formerly at optical networker JDSU) has brought in another former JDSU exec into the GreenVolts ranks.  Keith Lambert joined GreenVolts as Senior Vice President of Operations.  GreenVolts seemed to have a lot of momentum a few years ago, with lots of press and a PPA from PG&E, but that momentum seems to have slowed.  Now there's a new CEO and executive regime in place, albeit with no solar experience and no energy experience, added to shake things up.

Perhaps they can do for GreenVolts what they did for JDSU

 

Government Funding for CPV



Semprius and Spire Solar have both received government funding to research triple junction solar cells for CPV applications.    



And More



DFJ and NEA-funded Solar Junction is soon to emerge from stealth.  They build high efficiency solar cells for CPV.  They remain in the difficult position of waiting for the CPV market to accelerate.

We covered the acquisition of Concentrix by Soitec here.

GTM Research has a strong analysis of the CPV market here.