It is difficult to gauge the state of the concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) industry: Amongst system manufacturers, GreenVolts has folded and Amonix scaled back, but Soitec has announced big, bold plans. Although this indicates that life can be tough in the CPV industry, the sector should grow at a healthy rate according to research manager Sam Wilkinson from IHS, who has been talking to Richard Stevenson about the current state and prospects for this technology.

 

Q Who are the big players in the CPV industry today?

A Soitec is leading the way in terms of deployment. There have been several announcements of the large system that it is going ahead with in Africa.

There are also a number of other companies that are still active and really pushing their technology and their product. That’s the likes of Semprius, Amonix still to a certain extent; and at the solar cell level, Emcore and Solar Junction.

Q Why have some companies in this industry, such as GreenVolts and SolFocus, folded in the last year or so?

A In any space that is largely populated by start-up companies, it is never the case that all of the start-ups finally make it to be established companies in an established market. And the cost reductions in the silicon PV industry, which was ultimately one of the competing alternatives to CPV, made it incredibly difficult for CPV to compete in its target market. But we still believe that CPV is competitive, and can be a more attractive option in certain conditions and certain regions.

Q I presume the tough global economic conditions must have also made it hard for CPV companies to survive, let alone thrive?

A CPV companies rely heavily on financing and in today’s climate financing is difficult to secure for any technology. Choosing where you are investing and where you are lending money − especially given all the press regarding dumping and the rate at which prices have fallen − has made investors very wary of investing in any PV technology, let alone a start-up of that kind of ilk.

Q Over the last few years, there have been several announcements of massive CPV projects, such as Soitec’s contract to supply 305 MW to San Diego County. Have these projects fallen by the wayside, or are they underway?

A The PV industry is renowned for announcements of projects that may never happen. I remember when China first announced an incentive and there started to be a domestic market for PV in China: First Solar signed an MoU for a multi-GW plant in Inner Mongolia. That never happened, and that was probably four years ago.

The very first MoU is so far away from actually getting these projects developed and built. Some projects go ahead the whole way, and they turn into what they claimed they would be. But some never get past that very first contract because of a number of other issues, such as grid connections and financing. So many things can potentially hold up a project.

Other projects may go ahead in a much smaller version of what they claimed they were going to be. That’s probably the case with the large majority of these CPV projects. They will possibly go ahead in some format. However, I have some doubt about whether they will go ahead in the full capacity that once was claimed.

Q How many megawatts of CPV has now been installed around the globe?

A  At the end of 2012, we estimated that it was around 150 MW installed in total. That’s for high and low concentration, and includes silicon CPV. The large majority of CPV is in the US.

Q In these locations, are there incentives for green technology?

A Right now in the US it’s utility driven, signing PPAs [Power Purchase Agreements] and so on. So it’s not so much an incentive. But obviously the utilities there are required to meet certain renewables commitments, and so it is indirectly incentivised in that way.

In most other countries where CPV is deployed, it’s taking advantage of some kind of feed-in tariff, or some sort of PV incentive. There are some countries where they get an additional bonus − or there is some slightly different structure − for CPV compared to PV.

Q Can CPV make a big impact in rural locations?

A It is already being used there.  We do see a huge market for off-grid PV in general, and CPV could definitely fit into that.

Your question relates a little bit to storage. We have found that in those rural locations, the lead-acid storage battery is a huge part of that market at the moment. Over the next few years we will start to see some other new technologies, such as lithium ion and flow batteries come into that market as well. There is also a technology, sodium nickel chloride, which is from Fiam and GE. That’s got a lot of great properties for rural,off-grid use.

Q How do you expect CPV deployment to evolve in the next five years, and what factors will determine its success?

A We forecast strong growth for CPV. Obviously, it has hit a bit of a stumbling block in the last few years with the condition of its supplier base and a number of really, really strong challengers for the suppliers that are involved, but we see it growing to reach close to 1 GW in 2016. That’s driven by strong activity in developing regions for PV: places like the Middle East, South Africa, and also a lot of activity in China.

We have seen PV system prices fall incredibly quickly over the last few years. But that has really started to slow down, and increase in some regions, given things like anti-dumping and poly-silicon prices starting to rebound a little. So that should give some breathing room back to CPV, and could give it a little bit of opportunity to start moving forward a little bit.

Q Is CPV now a tried-and-tested technology, or is there still concern about reliability?

A It is tried and tested from a laboratory point of view and from a handful of projects. But it’s going to be a while before there are large projects that have been out there for a number of years, and we are looking at these projects as investments. If you go to a CPV conference, you couldn’t count the number of times that the word bankability is mentioned. That’s really one of the big sticking points of the industry. CPV naturally competes with silicon PV. The amount of silicon PV that is now deployed in the world, the amount of time that it has been out there, and the number of projects that have been performing for a long time, is concrete evidence that the technology works.

Q Emcore and Soitec, two of the heavyweights in the CPV industry, are vertically integrated. Do you believe this gives them an advantage?

A There are huge benefits to vertical integration. Developing cells, modules and optics in conjunction with each other and ensuring that they are working really well with each other throughout the process is surely going to give you some advantages − not to mention the cost-savings by keeping everything in-house.

But that said, when you are at low volumes and you are looking to establish yourself, the flexibility of contract manufacturing is quite attractive.

Q What do solar cell providers need to do to win orders?

A Efficiency, reliability and cost are all factors. However, more and more, we are seeing CPV companies forging partnerships with these companies. So, for the cell manufacturers, it come down to having the right partnerships at the right companies: The ones out there deploying their technology are the ones that are going to bring in the most business for them. For a CPV supplier, they are looking for a company that is going to work with their technology and optimise the cell to their optics.

Q There has been a lot of recent funding for multi-junction cell development. Do you think that move is important? Or are there other areas where improvement is more important, such as, for example, tracker technology?

A Almost all areas can be improved. Developing higher efficiency cells starts in the lab, and there they’ve got to keep increasing efficiencies, although we are already at incredibly high levels. It is also realising that next commercial step of taking technology from the lab to the electricity grid. That, for me, is the most important thing: Proving the technology and getting it deployed.

Q Is there a move to making systems with higher levels of concentration?

A There is and there isn’t. People are looking for the highest possible efficiency, and much greater yield, and they are going for the biggest numbers. This is the selling point of CPV.

But at the same time, you see SunPower starting to deploy some significant volumes of their technology, which is low efficiency in CPV terms. It uses their standard, high-efficiency, mono-crystalline silicon. This is far lower in efficiency than any triple-junction cell but very high efficiency in silicon terms. They are doing it on a single axis, keeping it very simple compared to what the big, high efficiency guys are doing. The interesting thing with Sunpower, of course, is that they are a big player in silicon PV. They are deploying CPV where they think it makes most sense. So the two are not really competing − they deploy them as they see fit.

Q Amonix recently claimed that it had raised the record for module efficiency to 36 percent. Is that evidence that the company is about to renew its commercial activity?

A There is no evidence that they are renewing manufacturing. But there is no way that they’d say that they had got this world record efficiency if they didn’t have some commercial plan for the future − quite what that is I don’t know, because they are a quiet company.
IHS Research recently published its “World Market for Concentrated PV (CPV)” report.


The French vertically integrated CPV outfit Soitec has recently netted financing, in the form of bonds, for a 44 MW-peak utility-scale plant in Touwsrivier, South Africa
 
·IHS Research recently published its “World Market for Concentrated PV (CPV)” report.