The cost of solar PV is dropping - or will shortly according to solar PV concentrator manufacturer Soliant Energy.

Solar concentrator technologies allow the same level of light to be captured often as a traditional panel technology. However they drastically reduce the cost of the photovoltaic components by concentrating the incident sunlight onto a much smaller surface area silicon or galium arsenide photovoltatic element.

Tracking systems are usually part and parcel of this mix to achieve the highest incident light percentage, and in many systems this means typically bulky systems with poor aesthetic quality and room mounting issues.

Soliant Energy solves this problem by having smaller individual cells as part of an array that fits into the standard existing mounting systems for PV. Even though some shading occurs across their elements, The ease of installation and reduced silicon costs has enabled the company to halve the typical PV unit cost for their 1st generation designs - yet still generate comparable power output. Second generation design will include double axis tracking.

The below pictures are from the Soliant Energy website, show their 1st Gen product

The Cleantech Show - Nick Bruse

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under PV, cleantech, climate change, company, concentrator, distributed energy, energy generation, environment, photo voltaic, solar, sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.