MARKET ANALYSISCPV


CPV market is tipped for take-off


The concentrated photovoltaics industry should deliver massive growth over the next few years, according to market analyst Carlos Márquez from CPV Today. But he says that this depends on recent installations demonstrating that this technology can generate electricity reliably, while offering investors a good return on their money. Richard Stevenson reports.


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or many people the recent economic downturn will be the toughest that they have ever lived through. While it may not have been as bad as the depression of the 1930s, when thousands and thousands queued on the streets for hours for food, many people have lost their job, seen the value of their investments plummet and are now facing a reduction in the services provided by their government, which is squeezing its belt.


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It’s not just individuals that have suffered over the last few years. Industry has also taken a battering, with the lack of available capital hitting the


emerging technology sector hard. This includes the concentrated photovoltaics (CPV) sector, a fledgling industry that was widely tipped to take off in the days before the phrase “credit crunch” had been coined.


The lack of capital available to CPV start-ups has hampered their efforts to promote themselves, accelerate their research and development and expand their manufacturing capacity. It has also been a contributing factor to acquisitions, such as that of Sol3G, which has gone under the wing on Abengoa Solar. In addition, capital constraints have led to postponement of some installations, including the world’s biggest CPV deployment, a 154 MW project in Mildura, Australia. This was caused by a Chinese investor withdrawing funding from Solar Systems.


Concentrix Solar GmbH, a spin-off of Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems that was founded in 2005, is located in Freiburg, Germany. It expanded its production capacity in 2008, and is now actively pursuing a project development of a 50 MW utility-scale power plant in the Western Cape, South Africa.


However, some of the CPV system builders have made progress over the last few years. Carlos Márquez, an analyst at CPV Today, points outs that Concentrix scaled up in 2008, which was right in the middle of the whole credit storm. And at the start of this year Amonix announced that it aimed to increase its annual production capacity from 30 MW to 100 MW per annum. By the end of this year this US outfit may well have topped that figure, because this July it also signed a lease on a manufacturing facility in North Las Vegas, Nevada, creating nearly 300 jobs and the opportunity to add a further 150 MW of production capacity. Márquez believes that this hike capacity will pay dividends, allowing Amonix to attain economies of scale.


It’s not just the likes of Amonix that have a positive view of the future. Despite concerns over double-


www.solar-pv-management.com Issue X 2010


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