New Concentrated Solar Tech: Simple, Cheap and Efficient
Morgan Solar, a Toronto-based company launched last summer, believes it has the answer to creating simple and cheap solar concentrators.
While other companies are working to make solar cheaper by using mirrors or lenses to magnify sunlight that is directed into solar cells, Morgan Solar takes a different approach. Their system uses a thin sheet of acrylic to concentrate sunlight 750 times. The sunlight is directed to a tiny cell on the edge of the plastic, greatly reducing the amount of material needed.
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Though Morgan Solar has competitors in the concentrated solar field, the company claims that their design is more efficient and less likely to break than other systems. And since their product requires so few materials—just aluminum, acrylic, and PV—it will be four times cheaper than other concentrated solar technologies.
Of course, Morgan Solar’s design is sure to draw comparisons to MIT’s announcement in July of a new technology that uses organic dyes to concentrate solar. But Morgan Solar claims that their optics are even more efficient.
We’ll find out whether the companies impressive claims are true in short order— a 1 meter by 1 meter prototype panel is currently being installed at the Earth Rangers Center in Toronto. The panel will begin producing electricity at the end of the month.
If Morgan Solar’s panels work as planned, concentrated solar may become a viable technology for countries that can’t afford the expensive systems available today.
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Actually, there are no quantum particles.
Things are a lot easier when you stop trying to shoehorn the subatomic into preconceived categories. Thinking of electrons as little green billiard balls orbiting a lumpy red nucleus only leads to confusion.
Let the equations dictate what the theory describes. In the case of QFT, the equations describe a continuous field. Excitations of the field travel as waves. Energy transfer (ie interaction) is allowed only in discreet qunta.
The “particles” we’re used to only appear when boundary conditions are applied (such as the particle in a box) But the particle is just a fiction. What really exists is the field, and the energy.
The real quantum mystery is not how a “particle” can be in two places at once. A wave is not so localized. The mystery is how the energy gets “concentrated” again in an interaction. How are conservation laws “enforced”?
If you simply *must* think of quantum entities as real particles or waves, pretend they travel as waves and interact as particles.
There a number of companies that have already commericialized the CPV technology and are selling and installing the systems today. The heat problem has already been solved. If you want to learn more, go to Emcore.com, unenergy.org, solfocus, isofoton, etc.. or just do a simple google search on CPV solar - Morgan’s technology is not unique or new, it is late. What is unfortunate is that our juvenile legislators are bickering at each other, trying to preserve big oil tax breaks, and letting solar and wind energy tax credits expire at the end of this year while hundreds of millions of investment and R&D dollars and thousands of jobs related to the solar energy sector are already moving offshore where the legislative and tax climate is much more favorable. Blog about that instead of companies that are a day late and a dollar short to the party. Keep in mind that previous wind energy tax credits have driven investments in the sector that have now dropped the cost per Kwh in half or better.
[...] lower cost and higher efficiency of concentrated solar as the shortest route to the mass market. Morgan Solar of Toronto has developed a concentrated solar technology based on thin sheets of acrylic, and [...]