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Solar concentrator company Sunrgi is planning to undercut
conventional grid electricity prices within twelve months,
using the same solar technology designed for satellites.
Sunrgi is planning a technology combining solar concentrators
with space-class solar technology based on germanium - which,
it claims, will produce energy costing five cents per kilowatt
hour when amortised over 20 years. The company would not reveal
the initial investment required in the equipment, which will
be initially sold to utilities and large-scale industrial
organisations.
The technology, which uses lenses to focus sunlight onto
solar material, has an efficiency of 37.5 per cent - the company
said - compared to around 15 per cent for conventional crystalline
solar panels. With sunlight generating 1MW per square metre,
that means it can harvest 375 watts, said Sunrgi CEO Paul
Sidlo.
The company is using solar chips from Boeing Spectrolabs
as the basis for the solar concentrator system. Spectrolabs
has previously been credited with developing
high-efficiency multi-junction solar material. The
lenses used by the company will focus the power of 2,000 suns
onto the solar material, said Sidlo, creating temperatures
of 3,400 degrees.
He added that the technology rests on two key pieces of intellectual
propery. Firstly, Sunrgi uses a proprietary cooling technology
to stop the intense heat from the lenses vapourising the solar
material.
"We have a nanomount on the back of the chip that has
a tremendous ability to move thousands of thermal watts of
energy away from the chip" - explained Sidlo. "It
uses nanotechnology that we developed." Once removed
from the chip by the nanotechnology, the heat eventually reaches
an aluminium heat sink that can help to move it out of the
solar array. In future versions, the company is considering
harvesting the waste heat and converting it back into power.
The other proprietary technology is a tracking system that
will minutely adjust the array's position to track the sun
- increasing the energy that a unit will be able to harvest
from the sun on a daily basis.
The company said it hopes to begin commercial production
in within 12 to 15 months.
For more information on Sunrgi - Click
Here
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