A Ray of Hope in Solar Energy | Green Energy News

March 29, 2008 – Vol.13 No. 1

A RAY OF HOPE IN SOLAR ENERGY.

It’s such a big planet. There’s so much going on – so much of it frightening. The mainstream daily news is often so grim that it overshadows all the positive news that’s never seen or heard - it’s safe to say - by most people.

If they only knew. There’s more good news out there than bad.

Many want the world to be powered by clean solar energy. Eventually they may get their wish. There’s certainly a continuing flow of good solar news - including here in the beleaguered US of A.

In Massachusetts a small startup company has formed that could revolutionize silicon-based photovoltaic solar electric power. That company, 1366 Technologies, has a new manufacturing process as well as new cell architecture that, says the company, will bring the cost of electricity from multi-crystalline silicon solar in line with that from coal-fired power plants.

With the new architecture, surface texture and metallization of the cell are improved which enhance cell efficiency by 25 percent: from 15-19 percent. While these improvements in cell efficiency and cost lowering improvements in manufacturing are proprietary and understandably not discussed, the company does describe one component of its new cell - its light capturing ribbon.

As small as they may seem, the interconnect wires, that metallic grid visible on most solar cells, block light and hampers the performance and electric output of the cell. 1366 is using a commercially available light-capturing ribbon to reflect 80 percent of sunlight that hits it back to the cell to generate electricity. With solar cells all minor improvements help.

The company is off to a good financial start and has received $12.4 million in a first round of financing co-led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners.

Regarding the new company, MIT Professor, 1366 founder and CTO, Ely Sachs notes that “The science is understood, the raw materials are abundant and the products work. All that is left to do is innovate in manufacturing and scale up volume production, and that’s just what we intend to do.”

Professor Sachs previously invented the String ribbon (tm) wafer technology commercialized by Evergreen Solar.

The new company is building a pilot plant in Lexington, Massachusetts and plans to build industrial-sized, 100-megawatt plants around the world.

So that’s great solar news from the US east coast. In the west it’s just as good.

Southern California Edison (SCE) has launched a project to install 250 megawatts of solar electric power in California. The project, gladly approved of by a US citizen that can never be President, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, will cover 65 million square feet - 2 square miles - of unused rooftops generating enough power for 162,000 homes.

The first solar rooftop installations will begin in August and continue at a rate of a megawatt a week. Doing the math it will take about 5 years to build the entire project that has an estimated cost of $875 million.

The unprecedented solar energy project was prompted by recent advances in solar technology that reduce the cost of installed photovoltaic generation. When combined with the size of SCE’s investment, the resulting costs per unit are projected to be half that of common photovoltaic installations in California.

From the Sunshine State there’s good solar news as well. FPL Energy, of Juno Beach, Florida has announced that it has applied to the California Energy Commission (CEC) to construct, own and operate a 250-megawatt solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert, in California.

The facility, to be called the Beacon Solar Energy Project, will be technologically similar to the Solar Energy Generating Stations (SEGS) the FPL operates in the Desert. The SEGS stations, with a combined output of 310 megawatts, have been providing clean power for 20 years using parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight to make steam to power generation equipment.

Beacon Solar will be built on a 2,000 acre site in eastern Kern County, California. It will take more than 2 years to build the project that will have 500,000-plus parabolic mirrors. With its SEGS facilities FPL Energy is the largest operator of solar power in the US and is also the largest owner and operator of wind power in the country with more than 5,000 megawatts currently in operation.

Links:

1366 Technologies
http://1366tech.com

Southern California Edison (SCE)
http://www.sce.com
http://www.sce.com/solarevent

FPL Energy
http://www.fplenergy.com

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