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IBM's HCPVT Converts 80 Percent of Incoming Solar Radiation into Useful Energy
Green Technology Featured Articles
February 27, 2014

IBM's HCPVT Converts 80 Percent of Incoming Solar Radiation into Useful Energy

By Michael Guta
TMCnet Contributing Writer

The amount of energy the sun provides in one day is more than what the current population would consume in 27 years. Suffice it to say, harnessing this energy can solve many of the problems on the planet related to energy. As a free and inexhaustible resource it provides many opportunities for anyone to use it as long as they have the infrastructure in place to make it happen. Thermal solar collectors have been around since 1767 when a Swiss scientist named Horace de Saussure used it to heat water and cook food. Since that time the introduction of other energy sources has put solar energy on the back burner, but today researchers are developing new methods to increase the efficiency of photovoltaic technology in the hopes it will gain larger adoption.


A collaboration established in April of 2013 with a three year, $2.4 million grant from the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation awarded to scientists at IBM Research; Airlight Energy, a supplier of solar power technology; ETH Zurich (Professorship of Renewable Energy Carriers) and Interstate University of Applied Sciences Buchs NTB (Institute for Micro- and Nanotechnology MNT) to research and develop an economical High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system has bared fruit.

According to IBM (News - Alert) the HCPVT technology is able to concentrate solar radiation 2,000 times while producing a large amount of heat that can be used for other applications such as desalinization of sea water.

The concentration of the HCPVT is achieved by using a big mirror that resembles a satellite dish to concentrate sunlight onto a semiconductor chip. The system tracks the sun to have the best possible angle at capturing the sun's rays. The mirror on the dish reflects onto microchannel-liquid cooled receivers with triple junction photovoltaic chips that are only 39-in. x .39-in. According to the researchers, each chip can convert 50 watts over a typical eight-hour day in a sunny region on average.

Each receiver combines hundreds of chips providing 25 kW of electrical power. According to the US Energy Information Administration, in 2012 the average annual electricity consumption for US residential utility customer was 10,837 kilowatthours (kWh) which averages out to 903 kWh per month. So if this system is made available to the public the potential for dramatically reducing the dependence on the grid for energy will be a reality.

Researchers believe they will be able to produce platforms in which levelized cost of energy will be less than 10 cents per kilowatt hour (KWh). The low-cost design of the system also makes it possible to achieve a cost per aperture area below $250 per square meter, which is three times lower than comparable systems.




Edited by Cassandra Tucker


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