Solar ♦ news digest
40,000 metric tons of CO2, the equivalent of taking 7,500 cars off the road, and will displace more than 340,000 metric tons of water consumption annually.
“First Solar values the support and leadership provided by El Paso Electric and the New Mexico State Land Office for this project,” adds Michael Hatfield, First Solar Director of Project Development. “The Macho Springs Solar Plant will be an exciting addition to the region’s renewable energy resources.”
The project represents a system resource for El Paso Electric Company as the Company will purchase the entire output power from the Macho Springs solar power project to serve its New Mexico and Texas service territory.
This project was secured by El Paso Electric through an all-source competitive Request for Proposal process conducted in 2011. The project will operate on a commercial lease from the State Land Office on about 500 acres of land at Macho Springs, near Deming. First Solar also has an interconnection agreement with El Paso Electric.
Sol Voltaics wins $6 million loan from SEA
The company will use the cash to further develop its gallium arsenide (GaAs) based Solink technology which is currently claimed to increase solar module efficiency by up to 25 percent
The Swedish Energy Agency (SEA), Sweden’s national authority for energy policy issues, has provided Sol Voltaics a $6 million conditional loan to further the commercial development of Solink.
This is an economical nanomaterial that the firm says promises to increase the efficiency of solar modules by up to 25 percent.
Sol Voltaics also announced that Erik Sauar, who for more than ten years served as the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at solar manufacturer REC and a longtime leader in the European solar industry, has become an investor.
“Solar will play an increasingly important role in global energy markets, but the industry right now is struggling,” says Viveca Johansson, program manager at the SEA. “The technology developed by Sol Voltaics holds the potential to simultaneously make solar competitive with fossil fuels at market prices while increasing the business case for developers and manufacturers.”
The loan is one of the largest ever issued to a company by the SEA, which manages the development of Sweden’s energy system.
Solink is a GaAs additive for crystalline silicon or thin-film solar modules that enables modules to convert more of the sun’s light into electricity. GaAs is one of the most efficient solar materials available today, but it has been confined to niche markets because of high costs.
Sol Voltaics solves this problem by minimising the amount of GaAs needed: less than a gram of nanowires is required to produce Solink-enhanced modules. Each GaAs nanowire in Solink, in fact, is an independent solar cell, making a Solink-enhanced module a vertically stacked device that generates energy from a wider light spectrum than a standard solar panel.
With Solink, a solar power plant or residential rooftop solar array will generate up to 25 percent more power than a standard system of the same size or generate an equal amount of power with smaller arrays. By maximising the physical assets, labour and real estate needed for photovoltaic systems, Sol Voltaics reduces the price of solar electricity.
Solink is applied to conventional solar panels toward the end of the existing module production process with relatively inexpensive standard equipment.
Lars Samuelson, Sol Voltaics’ founder and a professor at Lund University, headed the research teams that invented both Solink and Aerotaxy, an innovative, economical process for mass producing nanomaterials. (Scientific papers on solar nanowires and Aerotaxy were published by, respectively, Science and Nature in the past year.)
“Aerotaxy transforms the production of active nanomaterials from a scientific endeavour into a high- throughput manufacturing process,” explains Sauar. “With Solink, Sol Voltaics is essentially bringing the long- awaited promise of nano to the factory floor.”
Business Model and Product Roadmap
Sol Voltaics is currently producing GaAs nanowires in its laboratories in Lund, Sweden. The company has already demonstrated performance with 13.8 percent InP nanowires and it anticipates producing functional solar cells made from GaAs nanowires for demonstration by the end of 2013.
Commercial production of Solink-enhanced modules will begin in 2015 and move into volume production in 2016.
Rather than produce modules or sell capital equipment, Sol Voltaics will produce Solink and provide it to module
July 2013
www.compoundsemiconductor.net 133
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