http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-...ower-lies.html
Thinking big while focusing on small, a solar company and a national
energy lab combined talents to develop a solar power concentrator that
generates electricity at prices competitive with natural gas.
The Amonix 7700 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Solar Power Generator,
developed by Amonix and the U.S. Department of Energy's National
Renewable Energy Laboratory, is the size of an IMAX screen but costs
much less than comparable generators, partly because of the efficiency
of its small solar cells. It delivers more "energy per acre" than
anything yet available in the solar energy world.
The public-private partnership won a 2010 R&D 100 award at the annual
event honoring the greatest breakthroughs in technology, often called
"The Oscars of Invention."
NREL's partnerships with industry, such as this one with Amonix, are key
to reaching aggressive White House goals including lowering solar
energy's installed cost to $1 a watt, which would make America a leader
in renewable energy.
The 7700 uses acrylic Fresnel lenses to concentrate sunlight up to 500
times its usual intensity and direct it onto 7,560 tiny, highly
efficient multi-junction PV cells.
The cells, originally developed by NREL scientists, can convert 41.6
percent of the sunlight that shines on them into usable electricity in a
laboratory setting, a world record. Production cells never work quite as
well as cells produced in the lab. But the multi-junction cells on the
Amonix 7700 are achieving 31 percent efficiency at the module level and
27 percent at the system level in the field, the highest ever achieved
for an operating CPV concentrator.
That unprecedented efficiency opened the door to reducing costs and
reducing land use — both key for solar electricity to reach cost-parity
with fossil fuels.
Seeing the potential for game-changing cost cuts, Amonix, with technical
support from NREL's High-Performance PV Project and financial support
through DOE and its Solar Energy Technologies Program, redeveloped its
flagship CPV system using the multi-junction cells.
A six-inch square silicon wafer in traditional photovoltaic (PV) panels
produces about 2.5 watts of electricity. That same-sized wafer, cut into
hundreds of square-centimeter cells in the Amonix 7700, each teamed with
a Fresnel lens, produces more than 1,500 watts. It reduces the required
area for cells 500 times.
The 7700 already has driven the price of electricity from solar down to
the price of electricity from natural gas, according to the California
Market Price Referent, which establishes a proxy price for electricity
generated by a new state-of-the-art natural gas plant. Solar power is at
or near price parity in six other states that share California's sunny
and dry climates — Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas.
The 7700 also keeps down costs by integrating the lenses, the cells and
the mounting structure into a single unit that eliminates most of the
parts and costs associated with other concentrator designs. The seven
MegaModules that make up the 53-kilowatt system can be hauled on two
flatbed trucks, then assembled in the field in hours, rather than weeks.
Low-Cost, Efficiency Attract Interest from Utilities
Those cost-slashing measures, together with the Amonix 7700's
large-scale capacity, are catching the interest of utility companies
from California to Colorado. Twenty Amonix 7700s, erected on just five
acres of desert, can generate more than a megawatt of rated capacity,
enough to power 750 homes. That's half the space typically needed to
generate that much power.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority and California Polytechnic Institute
in California are among those that have purchased the Amonix 7700. The
DOE and Amonix are paying for testing of the 7700 at the Solar
Technology Acceleration Center (SolarTAC) in Aurora, Colo., to validate
the reliability of the system.
Multi-Junction Cells Key to Record-Setting Efficiency
The key breakthrough that lifted the 7700 to a 50 percent greater power
output than previous generations of Amonix generators was the
substitution of the multi-junction cells made of gallium indium arsenide
and gallium phosphide for the more common silicon cells.
Cells made from gallium, indium and other elements from the III and V
columns of the periodic table are more expensive to produce today, but
also can be more efficient at converting the sun's photons into usable
electrons for electricity.
NREL scientists had developed a high-efficiency multi-junction indium
gallium phosphide PV cell that had been used previously for energy for
spacecraft.
DOE, NREL High-Performance PV Project Funded Breakthrough
To offer up the more efficient multi-junction cell as a possible
replacement for the silicon cells used in most PV concentrators, NREL
issued a request for proposals for projects designed to accelerate
multi-junction cell development and their integration into CPV solar
systems. NREL awarded Amonix $1.2 million for a project that began in
2004 and concluded in 2008. At the end of the NREL project, Amonix was
able to demonstrate close to 31 percent efficiency for a
one-square-meter module — a world record at the time.
Martha Symko-Davies, a senior supervisor at NREL, recalled that most
concentrator companies could not see the benefits of switching to
new-generation solar cells, but Amonix was different, conducting
research and development with NREL to overcome stiff challenges.
The first NREL/Amonix project led to a larger award in 2007 from DOE for
$15.6 million leveraged by an additional $18 million of investor funds,
which helped make the transition to manufacturing of the Amonix 7700 at
the company's facility in Seal Beach, Calif.
Amonix has 15 years of experience developing CPV systems, while NREL has
a record of more than three decades of research and development in PV
technologies. The fruitful partnership, incoroporating the
high-efficiency multi-junction solar cell with Amonix's flagship CPV
system, came about through the High-Performance PV Project funded by the
DOE's Solar Energy Technologies Program.
Other DOE-funded support came from the Small Business Innovation
Research and Technology Pathway Partnership programs. DOE's Sandia
National Laboratories and Brookhaven National Laboratory also
facilitated the scale-up of this project.
A conundrum was how to use the highly efficient cells without breaking
the bank. Researchers solved that problem by teaming an inexpensive
Fresnel lens — at less than $2 a pop — with each of the 7,560 high
efficiency solar cells that make up one 53-kilowatt 7700 system. The
500-power amplification of the Fresnel lens allowed the solar cells to
be tiny — thus a small fraction of the cost of bigger cells — while
still packing record-setting efficiency.
There were other hurdles to clear, too.
Researchers developed a new receiver package of cells and lenses to
ensure that the cells would not short out. They solved the distortion
problem that happens when a lens doesn't focus all colors on the same
convergence point. And they overcame the thermal issues that crop up
when a cell has to handle the intensity of 500 suns.
Their efforts were rewarded in the form of $130 million in private
equity financing in 2010.
Expanding the Market to Everyone
Solar energy has found a niche on rooftops, especially of green-minded
homeowners. But if it is to play a major role in the broader electricity
market, it needs to come in at or below the costs of electricity
generated from coal, which is projected to cost from 6 cents to 15 cents
per kilowatt-hour in four years. The 7700's cost per kilowatt-hour is
expected to be well within those price ranges as production and sales
continue to grow.
"This development and R&D investment enabled the entire CPV industry,"
Symko-Davies said. "This could truly shake up the world and add
competition to the flat-plate technologies being deployed at utility scale."
The 7700's two-axis tracker can be repositioned throughout the day to
follow the sun, but also can be re-positioned to shield the cells from
extreme wind, increasing the life of the system. It allows the cells to
capture sunlight for a longer time throughout the day and through all
seasons of the year. Field tests indicate that depending on the
location, the two-axis tracker captures up to 50 percent more energy
than fixed one-axis systems.
Utilities expect their generators to last 50 years. The Amonix 7700 can
reach that target with proper maintenance and timely replacement of
certain parts, said a spokesman for the company.
Two Axis-Tracker, Modular Design Key to Cost Savings
The two-axis tracker is the only moving component on Amonix's CPV
systems and has been designed for reliability and minimum maintenance.
The energy needed to move the two-axis tracker amounts to less than 1
percent of the power output.
The system has just 12 subassemblies, which are shipped to installation
sites for deployment. Once the site is ready, an Amonix system can be
installed very quickly, within hours. By contrast, some systems require
shipment of thousands of parts to the installation site.
Cost savings were factored in every step of the way — from foundry to
grid — said Bob McConnell, who worked at NREL before he left the lab in
2007 to join Amonix and help bring the research to market.
The result is a generator manufactured at about a third to one half of
generators using crystalline silicon or thin-film approaches.
Multi-junction cells can operate at higher ambient temperatures than
traditional PV cells, making them ideal for sunny and dry climates in
the southwestern United States, and ripe for future cost reductions.
The concentrator also is kinder to the environment than most large
systems, using no water in its operation. Propped up two feet above the
land, it doesn't hinder the movement of wildlife.
"You simply can't put enough solar systems on rooftops to achieve the
scale and capacity necessary to generate electricity in the quantities
required by utilities and by society," said Amonix's founder and chief
technical officer, Vahan Garboushian. "This is a technology that can
meet the terawatt (trillions of watts) needs of the world for clean
electricity."
Dirk
http://www.neopax.com/technomage/ - My new book - Magick and Technology
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