A large solar panel sits atop a 22-foot tower at the University of California, San Diego, tilted toward the sun on a late spring morning. It appears similar to others in this beach city, but some say it will revolutionize the solar business.
The panel at the school makes two to three times as much electricity as a similar-sized conventional solar, said Soitec, the France-based manufacturer. Lenses on the surface focus sunlight onto solar cells while a tracking system shifts the panel every 10 seconds to always face the sun.
"From the moment the sun comes up over the horizon in the morning, our tracker is focused on it and remains focused on it throughout the day," said Mike Armstrong, Soitec's head of U.S. business development.
"At the end of the day as the sun goes down," Armstrong added, "it will come all the way back to the eastern horizon and wait precisely where the sun will rise the next morning."
Soitec's panel uses a technology known as concentrated photovoltaics, or CPV. The company, which calls its Concentrix CPV panels an important advance in green energy, recently announced it would manufacture the panels in San Diego County and sell them to developers in the southwestern United States.
That comes after fellow CPV maker Amonix Inc. in May opened an $18 million factory in north Las Vegas, built with the help of a $5.9 million investment tax credit from the 2009 stimulus legislation.
The moves could provide an important test of whether CPV represents a real advance, analysts said. The technology has existed for several years but so far has not resulted in a market shift.
"There are a lot of companies that have tried to do it, but no one has really broken through and been able to be a major producer," said Ken Zweibel, director of the GW Solar Institute at George Washington University. It is not yet possible to determine whether the technology is a significant advancement, he said, because "nobody has enough data in the marketplace."
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