SunRise HCPV Solar Panels

Xtreme Energetics' SunRise high concentration photovoltaic panels are designed for use in desert central utility solar power plants, and are expected to enter production in 2012. Each SunRise panel consists of several very thin micro-concentrator lenses at whose foci sit tiny chips of best-of-breed solar cells. Currently, these are triple junction solar cells operating at around 40% conversion efficiency. This distributed design helps in spreading the heat load across the back of the solar panel and allows the solar cells to operate at lower temperatures, and therefore higher efficiencies, while using only passive cooling. The net panel efficiency will, of course, be lower than the cell efficiency due to optical and electrical losses. Current state-of-the-art HCPV panels operate at around 25% panel efficiency. However, our patented SunRise concentrator has the potential to be extremely low loss compared to other types of concentrator, and therefore able to boost the panel efficiency above the 25% value. XE is working on achieving new approaches to manufacturing of both the optics and electronics that can realize these efficiency gains. Moreover, the SunRise design enables extremely thin, lightweight, and predominantly transparent solar panels, which have a generous acceptance angle thereby lowering the pointing accuracy requirement on the trackers. To learn more about the technology click here.