solfocus

Bright spot for one California college: A solar farm

Amid all the budget cuts at California's university and community college systems that administrators and students are facing, good news on a California campus is hard to come by these days.

Here is one bright spot.

Victor Valley College, a community college in Victorville, Calif., is partnering with SolFocus to add solar energy as a campus energy source and a part of its curriculum. It plans to install a 1-megawatt high-concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) solar farm on 6 acres of its campus.

The installation once completed will save the campus about a third in annual energy use and raise up … Read more

SolFocus lands Greek deal for concentrated solar

Solar start-up SolFocus on Monday said it has signed an agreement in Greece to produce electricity from its concentrated solar arrays.

The installation will produce 1.6 megawatts, enough to power about a town of about 2,500 residents at any given moment. Renewable-energy developer Samaras Group will head the installation, which is expected to be completed in the spring of 2009.

SolFocus, formed in 2006, is one of the leading companies in a race to validate concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) technology for utility use. It already has a handful of customers, including some in Spain.

Concentrated photovoltaic technology takes different forms, … Read more

Record deal for boosted solar panels

SolFocus, a maker of concentrator photovoltaic systems, has signed a $103 million (80 euro) deal with Empe Solar, a Spanish group that promotes solar energy use.

Concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) systems typically use lenses and mirrors to concentrate light on solar cells to maximize the amount of electricity they can generate.

SolFocus plans to install over 10 megawatts of CPV systems across southern Spain for Empe Solar between now and 2010 as part of the deal.

SolFocus has already completed three utility-scale projects in Spain.

The 10-megawatt installation would collectively generate enough energy to supply a town of 40,000 residents, … Read more

GreenVolts, which builds urban solar power plants, gets $10 million

GreenVolts, which is commercializing technology from the national labs to better concentrate sunlight, has received $10 million in funding.

The company, based out of San Francisco, has a concentrating system for photovoltaic panels that effectively lets its put the power of 625 suns onto a solar panel. The high concentration levels thus allow it to shrink the real estate required for a single power plant. As a result, the power plants can be built closer to the consumers--i.e. people living in the city or suburbs--which in turn cuts down the cost of transmission lines.

Several other companies are working … Read more

SolFocus raises $52 million more for concentrator

SolFocus, a solar technology company that was incubated at the Palo Alto Research Center (now an offshoot of Xerox), has raised $52 million more dollars to help it launch in Europe.

The company, which had previously raised $27 million, specializes in solar concentrators, which direct more sunlight onto solar cells that would ordinarily fall on them. The more sunlight, the more electricity the solar cell can generate. The more electricity a cell can generate, the more economical solar energy--which generally still costs about twice as much as regular grid power--becomes.

SolFocus' concentrators magnify the light 500 times. Several companies make … Read more