Solar ♦ news digest
in Portland, Oregon, which will begin commercial production later this year. SoloPower’s operations in Portland are ultimately expected to have a capacity of 400MW and employ 450 people.
“SoloPower is building our new manufacturing facility in Oregon because of the visionary leadership and support of the State of Oregon, the Oregon Department of Energy, and the City of Portland,” adds Tim Harris, Chief Executive Officer, SoloPower. “Portland’s highly skilled work force has enabled us to draw on very strong local talent as we create jobs and promote smart job-growth in the energy sector.”
SoloPower’s proprietary approach embodies critical technology, manufacturing, and cost advantages that enable large-scale “fab-style” production of high-efficiency CIGS-based photovoltaic cells. The CIGS cells are then packaged into unique, flexible, lightweight solar modules that require less balance- of-system hardware and are easier to install than traditional silicon solar panels.
SoloPower’s cells and modules are continually subjected to rigorous environmental and accelerated life cycle testing beyond the industry standards and are designed for superior performance under all light conditions.
The firm’s modules also have low profile bypass diodes that allow for maximum performance in the shade. The company says its latest solutions advance the possibilities of solar power integration, with proven technology that overcomes the product weaknesses of other thin-film solar modules and offers true flexibility for an large range of applications.
NREL’s Sarah Kurtz honoured by IEEE for work on III-V solar cells
The physicist was awarded for her work on gallium indium phosphide / gallium arsenide solar research
A physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who helped launch super-efficient multijunction solar cells and who is a pioneer in photovoltaic
Sarah Kurtz
Sarah Kurtz, a principal scientist and group manager at NREL, received the award at the IEEE’s annual Photovoltaic Specialists Conference in Austin, Texas, last week.
Kurtz and NREL colleague Jerry Olson championed the early use of multijunction solar cells by showing that a top cell of GaInP and a bottom cell of GaAs can capture and convert photons more efficiently into electricity than previous attempts at using other materials.
They showed that the multijunction concentrator cells not only use a fraction of the precious electronic materials used by the thicker flat plate cells, but that they can capture more light through the course of a day. Olson won the Cherry Award in 2011.
Their breakthrough was embraced by NASA, which uses multijunction solar cells based on this invention to power most space satellites, as well as the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.
Kurtz’s work helped illuminate how to grow high- quality cells, how to measure multijunction cells, and how their performance is affected under various spectra. More recently, she has looked at reliability issues of integrating multijunction cells and solar PV in general into larger systems.
“The question on the street — how to predict the lifetime of modules — comes in different flavours,” Kurtz said during a break in the Austin conference. “They come from people who are determining the warranties, customers who want to choose
July 2012
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systems reliability has been awarded the Cherry Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
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