DOE Attempts to Jump-Start Concentrated Solar

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540856/doe-attempts-to-jump-start-concentrated-solar/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]DOE Attempts to Jump-Start Concentrated Solar[/font]

[font size=4]Researchers seek breakthroughs for a technology designed to make solar more efficient.[/font]

By Richard Martin on August 26, 2015

[font size=3]Attempting to jump-start research on novel solar technology, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) on Monday announced new funding for concentrated solar photovoltaic projects. Awarded under ARPA-E’s Micro-scale Optimized Solar-cell Arrays with Integrated Concentration (MOSAIC) program, the money will go to 11 projects at 10 organizations, including MIT, Xerox PARC, Texas A&M, and the solar manufacturer Semprius.

Concentrated PV (or CPV), which uses lenses and mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on tiny PV cells, could dramatically increase the efficiency and lower the cost of producing electricity from sunlight. MOSAIC’s goal is to “double the amount of energy each solar panel can produce from the sun, while reducing costs and the space required to generate solar energy.”

During the solar boom of 2005 to 2008, several startups developing CPV systems received federal government support and funding from venture capital firms, only to collapse when low-cost Chinese manufacturers drove down the cost of conventional solar panels (see “One Step Forward, One Step Back for Concentrated PV” and “Will a Breakthrough Solar Technology See the Light of Day?”). Today, CPV remains too expensive and complicated to replace conventional solar installations on a widespread basis.

Although the efficiency of conventional solar PV has increased and costs have fallen dramatically in the last several years, solar power generation remains generally more expensive than producing electricity with low-cost fossil-fuel plants. The efficiency of conventional solar PV panels (in terms of the portion of energy in sunlight converted to electricity) lingers below 20 percent. CPV systems already achieve efficiencies of 30 percent, and promise much higher.

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[kristopher]

1. Hmmm. Modular panels. Some text from the press release

"Today in Las Vegas, President Obama and Energy Secretary Moniz announced at the Clean Energy Summit (link is external) $24 million in innovation funding for 11 new solar technologies, as part of ARPA-E’s newest program, MOSAIC. Short for Micro-scale Optimized Solar-cell Arrays with Integrated Concentration, MOSAIC projects seek to develop a new class of cost-effective, high-performance solar energy modules.

ARPA-E Director Dr. Ellen D. Williams responded to the announcement, stating “The MOSAIC program demonstrates ARPA-E’s novel approach to energy innovation. By bringing together cutting edge advances in micro-fabrication, materials science and mechanical actuation, MOSAIC will create new options for solar generation and help make clean energy technologies even more affordable.”

MOSAIC aims to develop new solar modules with the high performance of concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) technologies, but at a cost and profile similar to commonly used flat-plate PV. Although CPV is much more efficient than flat-plate PV, CPV has not been widely adopted due to its high cost, large size and expensive solar tracking systems. MOSAIC project teams will address these limitations by designing micro-scale CPV systems that can be integrated into flat-plate solar panels. These micro-CPV technologies will use thousands of small lenses to concentrate sunlight onto an array of micro-PV cells in order to achieve a higher solar-to-electricity conversion. By exploiting micro-CPV techniques, the teams aim to reduce system costs and dramatically improve flat-plate PV efficiency – and thereby expand the market and geographic areas in which these technologies can operate successfully."

http://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=news-item/11-projects-funded-high-performance-solar-power