INDUSTRY CPV
Q A
What do solar cell providers need to do to win orders?
Efficiency, reliability and cost are all factors. However, more and more, we are seeing CPV companies forging partnerships with these companies. So, for the cell manufacturers, it come down to having the right partnerships at the right companies: The ones out there deploying their technology are the ones that are going to bring in the most business for them. For a CPV supplier, they are looking for a company that is going to work with their technology and optimise the cell to their optics.
Q
The French vertically integrated CPV outfit Soitec has recently netted financing, in the form of bonds, for a 44 MW-peak utility-scale plant in Touwsrivier, South Africa
We have seen PV system prices fall incredibly quickly over the last few years. But that has really started to slow down, and increase in some regions, given things like anti-dumping and poly-silicon prices starting to rebound a little. So that should give some breathing room back to CPV, and could give it a little bit of opportunity to start moving forward a little bit.
Q A
Is CPV now a tried-and-tested technology, or is there still concern about reliability?
It is tried and tested from a laboratory point of view and from a handful of projects. But it’s going to be a while before there are large projects that have been out there for a number of years, and we are looking at these projects as investments. If you go to a CPV conference, you couldn’t count the number of times that the word bankability is mentioned. That’s really one of the big sticking points of the industry. CPV naturally competes with silicon PV. The amount of silicon PV that is now deployed in the world, the amount of time that it has been out there, and the number of projects that have been performing for a long time, is concrete evidence that the technology works.
Q A
Emcore and Soitec, two of the heavyweights in the CPV industry, are vertically integrated. Do you believe this gives them an advantage?
There are huge benefits to vertical integration. Developing cells, modules and optics in conjunction with each other and ensuring that they are working really well with each other throughout the process is surely going to give you some advantages − not to mention the cost-savings by keeping everything in-house.
But that said, when you are at low volumes and you are looking to establish yourself, the flexibility of contract manufacturing is quite attractive.
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www.compoundsemiconductor.net June 2013 A
There has been a lot of recent funding for multi-junction cell development. Do you think that move is important? Or are there other areas where improvement is more important, such as, for example, tracker technology?
Almost all areas can be improved. Developing higher efficiency cells starts in the lab, and there they’ve got to keep increasing efficiencies, although we are already at incredibly high levels. It is also realising that next commercial step of taking technology from the lab to the electricity grid. That, for me, is the most important thing: Proving the technology and getting it deployed.
Q A
Is there a move to making systems with higher levels of concentration?
There is and there isn’t. People are looking for the highest
possible efficiency, and much greater yield, and they are going for the biggest numbers. This is the selling point of CPV.
But at the same time, you see SunPower starting to deploy some significant volumes of their technology, which is low efficiency in CPV terms. It uses their standard, high-efficiency, mono-crystalline silicon. This is far lower in efficiency than any triple-junction cell but very high efficiency in silicon terms. They are doing it on a single axis, keeping it very simple compared to what the big, high efficiency guys are doing. The interesting thing with Sunpower, of course, is that they are a big player in silicon PV. They are deploying CPV where they think it makes most sense. So the two are not really competing − they deploy them as they see fit.
Q A
Amonix recently claimed that it had raised the record for module efficiency to 36 percent. Is that evidence that the company is about to renew its commercial activity?
There is no evidence that they are renewing manufacturing. But there is no way that they’d say that they had got this world record efficiency if they didn’t have some commercial plan for the future − quite what that is I don’t know, because they are a quiet company.
£ IHS Research recently published its “World Market for Concentrated PV (CPV)” report.
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