*every month the CleanEnergyBlogger Steering committee will choose one or two interesting company which will be selected out of a list created by the CleanEnergyBlogger team, plus companies that have announced a significant achievement during the month, plus companies that have approached the CleanEnergyBlogger with a brief presentation that has intrigued us to share it with our readers. We realize this is an arbitrary – definitely not a scientific selection – but it is being selected by professionals*
You are invited to propose Companies via the following email:
and refer to the following criteria:
Criteria One: the soundness, technical merit of its technology
Criteria Two: the qualifications of its team
Criteria Three: the potential of the company to become No. One in its field, OR: the
potential for commercial applications and the ability to
commercialize the technology (in case it is yet in an early stage).
Company of this month: CONCENTRIX
Concentrix Solar is a spin-off of Fraunhofer (a very famous institute in Germany). It has received its first financing already in 2005 from Good Energies, an investment company in the solar photovoltaics industry. (Good Energies invested also in other companies like Q-Cells).
Concentrix’s basic technologies differ as well as their research partners, and management team.
Concentrix has already begun delivering demonstration modules to strategic partners – like Abengoa, that has invested in the co-operation, which was started a few months ago. Lately they have announced that during the measurement period in May 2008, AC system efficiencies of 23% were achieved, and higher were measured under normal operating conditions for a demonstration system located at the test site of Abengoa Solar in Seville, Spain.
Concentrix is now constructing a 25 MW production line in Freiburg, Germany, and plans to start operations in Fall 2008.
Concentrix is using Fresnel lens, but inorder to avoid the disadvantages of the plastic made Fresnel, they use their unique FLATCON® (Fresnel Lens All-glass Tandem cell Concentrator) technology; where the Fresnel lenses are fabricated in a silicone film on the inside of the module top glass plate, and the entire module housing is also made of glass to avoid thermal mismatch with the different materials.
One of the technology disadvantages: Concentrix has less wider acceptance angle (of 0.6° comparing to SolFocus +/-1°, for example); the meaning is that their tracking systems should be more accurate and more expensive. Also, Concentrix has more conservative plans to achieve a module cost of €1.23 per Watt at 20MWp production levels and fully installed costs, including the inverter, tracker hardware, and installation, of €2.35 per Watt. (~3.75USD),
**However, the CleanEnergyBlogger team prefers these conservative assumptions rather than others that claim to achieve in mass production 2USD per watt
Concentrix is targeting large solar electric installations of commercial, industrial, and power station scale. While others are more optimistic about the application of their products outside the sunlight rich areas, we like the conservatism of Concentrix that say that their FLATCON modules will only be competitive in locations such as southern Europe, North Africa, or the American southwest.**
I wanted to see what your thoughts are on Algae as a Fuel? Here is a cool video about it: http://greenenergytv.com/Watch.aspx?1472348255
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This is a very innovative project that should set good example on the application of solar energy to provide large amount of energy and prove the potential of solar panels as an alternative pollution free powerplant.