news digest ♦ Solar
manufacturers to incorporate into their own products. A single, relatively small facility is capable of delivering hundreds of megawatts worth of materials to module manufacturers worldwide.
The conditional loan, from the Swedish Energy Agency will be used to develop a larger Aerotaxy machine, further refine the liquid carriers in Solink and scale deposition and bonding techniques for industrial use.
Other potential applications for Aerotaxy include nanomaterials for power electronics, LEDs, batteries and energy storage.
Other investors in Sol Voltaics include Industrifonden, Foundation Asset Management, Provider Venture of Sweden, Teknoinvest, Kagra, Nano Future Invest and Scatec Energy of Norway. The company has also received public funding from the European Union, Vinnova, Nordic Innovation Center, and others.
“We are tremendously gratified to add the support of the Swedish Energy Agency and Erik Sauar,” comments David Epstein, CEO of Sol Voltaics. “We have two goals: to make solar more profitable for solar manufacturers and developers and to lower the price of solar energy for consumers, utilities and businesses. We look forward to demonstrating our technology later this year.”
Lux Research: SiC & GaN are key to solar inverter market
Devices using wide bandgap semiconductors, specifically silicon carbide and gallium nitride, will offer the greater competitive advantage in microinverters and small string inverters
downstream demand for solar modules which will grow to $1.4 billion in 2020. That reflects a solid 7 percent CAGR, slightly lower than the 9 percent for all renewables and grid-based power electronics.
As devices featuring GaN and SiC hit the market, they’ll offer the biggest competitive advantage in small systems. These will include microinverters and small string inverters, for residential and commercial solar installations - with a powerful proposition: lowering levelised cost of electricity (LCOE), and increasing margins on electricity sold through leases and power purchase agreements. They also will deliver improved performance and reliability.
“The holy grail for solar inverters is the implementation of wide bandgap semiconductors - specifically, silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Pallavi Madakasira, Lux Research Analyst and one of the lead authors of the report titled, “Reaching for the High Fruit: Finding Room for SiC and GaN in the Solar Inverter Market.”
“The performance benefits from both are such that inverter suppliers could charge a premium price and still achieve a significantly lower LCOE,” she adds.
To understand the performance benefits of switching to GaN and SiC, Lux Research analysts modelled the three major types of inverters - microinverters, string inverters and central inverters - with Si, SiC, and GaN components.
The Lux Research team reported the following insights:
Higher efficiencies in smaller inverters.Power electronics with discrete devices made from GaN and SiC, rather than incumbent silicon, can increase efficiencies for solar micro- and string inverters to over 98 percent. The diodes increase harvested energy by more than 1.5 percent while the transistors can increase it by more than 4 percent. GaN-on-silicon offers the lowest cost solution while GaN-on-SiC and SiC-on-SiC offer far superior efficiency.
Microinverters will command highest
premiums.SiC and GaN have the greatest price premium power (>$0.10/ Wp) in microinverters, without increasing LCOE. Though a niche solution, the microinverter segment is also an attractive segment for SiC and GaN to see early adoption and ramp up volumes.
Wide bandgap semiconductors, in particular SiC and GaN will lead the charge as the market for solar inverter discrete devices.
According to Lux Research, this will be driven by the 134
www.compoundsemiconductor.net July 2013
Indirect benefits add to the value
proposition.GaN and SiC also result in indirect cost savings in the form of a reduced failure rate of passive components, footprint reduction and savings in installation cost. Also, their superior thermal conductivity reduces the size of the heat sink in inverters.
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