Solar Energy Telescopeare are Efficient and Inexpensive as Well

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A University of Arizona engineering team led by Roger Angel has designed a new type of solar concentrator that uses half the area of solar (PV) cells used by other optical devices and delivers a light output/concentration that is over 1000 times more concentrated before it even hits the cells. This comes as a result of a broader goal to make solar energy cost competitive with fossil fuels (target = 1$/W) without the “need for government subsidization.”

The whole system is unique in a number of ways. It uses no water, has a low environmental impact and produces a high volume of electricity in terms of land acreage used for equipment. The modular, sun-tracking systems are large, lightweight open structures, requiring on-site assembly. The jobs created to build, deploy and maintain them remain local. Instead of using expensive PV cells, the solar telescope uses commercially available triple-junction solar cells, which have three junctions that each capture energy from different wavelengths of light. These solar cells have more than double the conversion efficiency of conventional (single-junction) cells. 

Eight dish reflectors and their associated optics and photovoltaics as well as cooling and tracking components are all integrated into a space frame structure. It was constructed in the lightest possible way using lightweight high strength low alloy steel in a mechanically efficient framework.