More Funding for a Different Focus on CPV From REhnu

Can the design for a better CPV mousetrap come from a telescope scientist?

Eric Wesoff January 11, 2012

Eric Wesoff

Editor-at-Large
Greentech Media

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

Here's a quick funding update from a non-conventional early-stage CPV firm. According to an SEC filing, REhnu just collected close to $1 million in funding from undisclosed investors.

REhnu (pronounced “renew”) is a relatively new name in the concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) world. The firm is early-stage and has a slightly different twist on the architecture of a CPV system.

But let's start with the name. The 'RE' in REhnu stands for 'renewable energy.' The 'hnu' is from the formula E=hν or E=hnu, which relates the energy ('E') of a photon to the photon’s frequency, given by the Greek letter ν, or 'nu,' and Planck’s constant, 'h.'

Which, in case you haven't been keeping track, places us deep in central Nerdistan.

Dr. Roger Angel, the designer of the CPV product and, presumably, the company's name, has a background in astronomy at the University of Arizona. Angel leads the UA solar high concentration photovoltaics research group and has co-authored three patents covering the technology licensed by REhnu. His technological innovations are used to make the world’s largest and most aspheric telescope mirrors.

Building the world's biggest telescopes has, in Angel's view, given him the ability to think through the CPV design as a system. It's allowed Angel to approach the problem without any previously held conceptions about CPV -- and not to feel compelled to make CPV look like flat-panel PV.

Angel is looking to drive costs down to a dollar per watt installed by scrubbing cost out of a few areas -- primarily by using the least amount of glass and steel possible.

REhnu's design uses what Angel calls "the native form of manufactured glass" -- the 3-meter sizes from a glass factory -- as the reflectors. The design allows a window-glass factory to be modified to produce the glass reflectors, which are then arranged on a steel space frame. The space frame has rigid nodes and the "mechanics of the 2-axis tracker respects the nodes," according to Angel.

The system operates at 1000X concentration, and with a cost of $5.00 per square centimeter for the triple-junction solar cells, Angel says that gets the cell cost down to 15 cents per watt. The system doesn't place a lens on every solar cell, as is the case in almost every CPV architecture. A ball lens at the focus of each large dish sends the same amount of light power to each of 36 cells, so that all of them produce the same amount of electrical current. Active cooling is used rather than massive aluminum heat sinks to scrub off heat.

Prototype of REhnu's 20-kilowatt CPV system

Angel estimates the mass of steel as 100 kilograms per kilowatt of output and expects to have one complete 2-kilowatt-plus dish/receiver working by the end of May and eight of them in a full 20-kilowatt system early next year.

Land usage is estimated at 4 acres per megawatt, while the ground clearance and open design of the space frame are designed to be gentle to the environment at the installation site.

UA has raised $4 million in R&D funding, mostly from the DOE and Science Foundation Arizona. REhnu has raised about $2 million so far. Once the full tracker unit is populated and generating 20 kilowatts, Angel looks to raise a $25 million Round A to build manufacturing facilities and get to two megawatts of production.

CPV vendors remain in a ruthless cost race with the crystalline silicon solar behemoths while holding a potential advantage in high-temperature environments. Perhaps a telescope scientist can crack this nut.