Big Oil's Cutting Edge Solar Project

February 23, 2010 – Vol.14 No.49

BIG OIL’S CUTTING EDGE SOLAR PROJECT.
by Bruce Mulliken,Green Energy News

It’s safe to say that there are many new, large solar projects being planned or under construction worldwide at any given moment. More than likely most will be run-of-the-mill flat panel photovoltaic projects. Increasingly, however, solar thermal power generation projects are joining the ranks as “in progress.”

A decade or so ago ANY large solar project of any kind was noteworthy, now it takes a particularly interesting one to grab the headlines. This is the story of one of those projects.

Chevron Technology Ventures, a division of the major oil company, has announced that it will build a one-megawatt concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) solar facility on the tailing site of Chevron Mining Inc’s (CMI) molybdenum mine in Questa, New Mexico.

What makes the project an eye-catcher is not that an oil company has gotten itself involved with renewable energy. This is not the first green energy project for Chevron. Other oil companies are involved with clean and renewable energy as well.

Nor does the fact that the project is being built on otherwise unproductive land make it special. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have recently announced that they will be evaluating a dozen brownfield sites for solar energy projects, for instance. Brownfield sites are not new to solar power, either.

The difference is that the Chevron Questa, New Mexico will be the largest CPV installation in the US and one of the largest in the world. The project will also mark the US and global launch of Concentrix Solar’s CPV technology for use in utility-scale projects worldwide. Concentrix Solar, of Freiburg, Germany will be supplying its state-of-the-art CPV technology for the project. The project will be a US showplace for a cutting edge energy technology paid for by big oil.

The Chevron project will use 175 Concentrix FLATCON(R) tracking solar modules to generate the 1000 kilowatts of power. Each module has a nominal power output of 6 kilowatts. With the technology, sunlight is focused with Fresnel lenses onto stacked layers of small, highly efficient solar cells. Sunlight is concentrated almost 500 times by the lenses.

Concentrix uses three different types of cells in each stack. Each triple junction cell can convert to electricity from a particular region of spectral radiation: short wave, medium wave and infrared. The cells are expensive and ordinarily used in space applications, but the use of the concentrating lenses reduces the size and number of cells needed for a given output in a module.

The company says AC system efficiency per module is 25 percent, which is considerably higher than conventional solar electric products. That efficiency figure has been confirmed through a Concentrix demonstration system installed on the University of California San Diego campus since July 2009.

Solar electricity generated from the technology should cost 10 - 20 percent less than conventional solar photovoltaic.

The project will be laid out over 20 acres, but the company says a one megawatt solar plant could be built on as little as 7 acres.

The electricity produced by the Chevron project will be sold to Kit Carson Electric Cooperative through a power purchase agreement. Project construction is scheduled to begin in the spring and conclude by the end of 2010.

Concentrix Solar GmbH is a new division of the Soitec Group which makes more than 80 percent of the world’s silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers for microelectronics industries. Concentrix, founded in 2005, has a production capacity of 25 MW per year of solar modules.

Chevron Technology Ventures (CTV), a division of Chevron, USA, Inc., champions innovation, commercialization and integration of emerging technologies and related new business models within Chevron. CTV is pursuing this goal through business units involving biofuels, emerging energy and venture capital.

Links:

Concentrix Solar
http://www.concentrix-solar.de

Soitec Group
http://www.soitec.com.

Chevron Technology Ventures
http://www.chevron.com