Solar ♦ news digest normal irradiation.
The KJC-Soitec MOU is in line with the on going thrust of Saudi Arabia to explore and tap into renewable energy sources, as shown by the white paper recently published by the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (
K.A.CARE) which outlines the competitive procurement process for solar, wind, geothermal and waste to energy projects in Saudi Arabia.
Sheik Khaled Juffali, founder and chairman of KJC, commenting on the deal, says, “Soitec holds a leading position in the CPV industry with a pipeline of projects totaling hundreds of megawatts in the USA and South Africa and operates in 14 countries around the world, including a demonstration system at the Medina College of Technology (MCT) in Saudi Arabia.”
He adds, “Soitec has already demonstrated its ability to industrialise disruptive innovations with high-quality standards. Thanks to Soitec’s leading CPV technology, our partnership will have a true competitive advantage and help to realise the Kingdom’s high solar potential. CPV is indeed perfectly suited for countries which benefit, like Saudi Arabia, from intensive solar radiation.”
IBM multijunction flower cell aims to hit 2000 suns
The firm’s prototype HCPVT system uses a large parabolic dish, incorporating many mirror facets, which are attached to a sun tracking system. The tracking system positions the dish at the best angle to capture the sun’s rays, which then reflect off the mirrors onto several microchannel-liquid cooled receivers with triple junction compound semiconductor chips
Scientists are collaborating to increase concentrating solar radiation by 2,000 times and converting 80 percent of the incoming radiation into useful energy.
The system could also provide desalinated water and cool air in sunny, remote locations where they are often in short supply.
A three-year, $2.4 million (2.25 million CHF) grant from the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation has been awarded to scientists at IBM Research, Airlight Energy, a supplier of solar power technology, ETH Zurich (Professorship of Renewable Energy Carriers) and the Interstate University of Applied Sciences Buchs NTB (Institute for Micro- and Nanotechnology MNT).
Together, the institutes aim to develop an economical High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT)
system.
Based on a study by the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association and Greenpeace International, technically, it would only take two percent of the solar energy from the Sahara Desert to supply the world’s electricity needs.
According to this study, the researchers say that solar technologies on the market today are too expensive and slow to produce; they require rare Earth minerals and lack the efficiency to make such massive installations practical.
The prototype HCPVT system uses a large parabolic dish, made from a multitude of mirror facets, which are attached to a sun tracking system. The tracking system positions the dish at the best angle to capture the sun’s rays, which then reflect off the mirrors onto several microchannel-liquid cooled receivers with triple junction photovoltaic chips. Each 1x1 centimetre chip can convert 200-250 watts, on average, over a typical eight hour day in a sunny region.
The entire receiver combines hundreds of chips and provides 25 kilowatts of electrical power. The photovoltaic chips are mounted on micro-structured layers that pipe liquid coolants within a few tens of micrometers off the chip to absorb the heat and draw it away 10 times more effective than with passive air cooling.
The coolant maintains the chips almost at the same temperature for a solar concentration of 2,000 times and can keep them at safe temperatures up to a solar concentration of 5,000 times.
The direct cooling solution with very small pumping power is inspired by the hierarchical branched blood supply system of the human body and has been already tested by IBM scientists in high performance computers, including Aquasar.
An initial demonstrator of the multi-chip receiver was developed in a previous collaboration between IBM and the Egypt Nanotechnology Research Centre.
“We plan to use triple-junction photovoltaic cells on a micro-channel cooled module which can directly convert more than 30 percent of collected solar radiation into electrical energy and allow for the efficient recovery of an additional 50 percent waste heat,” says Bruno Michel, manager, advanced thermal packaging at IBM Research.
“We believe that we can achieve this with a very practical design that is made of lightweight and high strength concrete, which is used in bridges, and primary optics composed of inexpensive pneumatic mirrors -it’s frugal innovation, but builds on decades of experience in
June 2013
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