Power and energy company Delta Electronics has successfully completed the development of a certified and cost effective assembly process to manufacture concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) modules, a solar cell technology that claims to provide greater than 35% efficiency.
Collaborated with Spectrolab, who originally developed the underlying technology, Delta aims to enable wide availability of CPV modules by its advanced assembly process and bring about an r alternative to the burgeoning solar power industry.
Spectrolab Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing, develops highly efficient terrestrial concentrator solar cells. The company recently demonstrated the ability to convert 40.7 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo., verified the milestone.
Delta collaborated closely with several leading companies in the field, including Spectrolab, to develop a viable assembly process that solves difficult to address issues such as material suitability, heat dissipation, and hot spot formation. Spectrolab will qualify the new assembly process according to IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) standards of CPV receivers and modules. The assembly process is currently being evaluated by Spectrolab and shall be qualified as part of Spectrolab’s efforts to demonstrate the robustness of the solar cell receiver assembly under high concentration.
“We believe that the solar cell receiver assembly process developed by Delta will enable Spectrolab to offer its customers the opportunity to obtain a complete receiver design that has been proven reliable, thus enabling our customers to speed up their entry into the CPV market,” said Raed Sherif, General Manager of the terrestrial photovoltaic products at Spectrolab, in a statement. “Spectrolab will continue to focus its efforts on developing next generation high-efficiency solar cells, and on increasing factory production capacity in order to improve the overall system economics.”
Spectrolab has leveraged its expertise in space photovoltaic products to fabricate multijunction solar cells optimized for the terrestrial spectrum. The use of the high-efficiency multijunction solar cells in a high-concentration photovoltaic (HCPV) module offers the best opportunity to reduce the cost of solar energy, making it a commercially viable option to generate electricity.
According to several industry sources, the market for concentrator PV-based power production plants is projected to exceed $500 million by 2010.
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Spencer Chin is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
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