by Todd Woody
I’m waving the green flag of surrender, crushed by the organic
cotton-gloved fist of the enviro-public relations-industrial complex.
I will write an Earth Day column, my resistance broken by
the ceaseless pitches from corporate PR people to include “in your Earth Day
coverage” everything from how to “go green between the sheets [and] make your
love life sustainable,” to a certain multinational beverage company’s
LEED-certified bottling plant, to a defense contactor’s environmental initiatives.
It just won’t be a column about any of those things.
As I fruitlessly explained to those who wouldn’t take their
deleted pitches and unanswered phone calls as a sign of my lack of interest,
every day is Earth Day for environmental reporters.
Photo courtesy of AmonixSo I’m going to write about something that in the pre-blog
era was known as news. On Earth Day eve, a Southern California solar company
called Amonix announced that it had raised $129.4 million from a group of
investors led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s
most prominent venture capital firms and a leading green tech investor.
It’s a big chunk of change—one of the largest green tech
deals of the year—and a sign that investors continue to see a significant potential
payoff in solar technology, even one that has been in development by Amonix for
the past 20 years.
That’s right—two decades. That’s several lifetimes in VC
years.
Amonix makes concentrating photovoltaic power plants, known
in the business as CPV. Plastic lenses—other companies use mirrors—concentrate sunlight on tiny and expensive, but highly efficient solar cells.
Conventional solar panels concentrate the sun one time;
Amonix’s CPV panels—and those of some rivals—concentrate the sun 500
times. That solar intensity coupled with what is called a “multi-junction”
solar cell allows Amonix’s systems to generate more electricity than standard
solar panels in regions that receive intense direct sunlight.
(But you won’t be seeing Amonix’s CPV Solar Power Generator
on rooftops. Each unit is as tall as a five-storey building and generates 72
kilowatts of electricity.)
“CPV is hands down the most cost-effective for hot and sunny
desert environments and will outperform other solar technologies,” says Brian
Robertson, Amonix’s chief executive.
But only some 19 megawatts of CPV have been installed
worldwide, compared to thousands of megawatts of conventional photovoltaic
systems.
“If you look at the history of CPV as a technology, it has
been around several decades but the industry hasn’t taken off,” says Ben
Kortlang, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who formerly was the co-head of Goldman
Sachs’ alternative energy investment division.
High costs and technological challenges—such as keeping
the units cool—as well as bankers’ skittishness about financing bleeding edge
technology—limited CPV’s commercial appeal, according to Kortlang and
Robertson. But those obstacles appear to have been largely overcome and the
technology is starting to be deployed in the United States.
Robertson said Amonix has built 13 megawatts’ worth of CPV
power plants, mostly in Spain, which had offered generous subsidies for solar
power. Competitor SolFocus, a Silicon Valley startup, last month began
construction of a one-megawatt CPV farm at Victorville Community College in the
Southern California desert and this week announced that it would supply its
technology for a 300-kilowatt array to be built at Alice Springs Airport in
Australia.
“Amonix has removed the key challenges that have held the
CPV back,” says Kortlang. “We’re now seeing Amonix on a rapid commercial ramp
up.”
If that holds true, CPV could be a big boost to distributed
generation and change the calculus of deploying massive solar thermal power
plants in the desert Southwest. (Solar thermal farms use thousands of mirrors
spread over thousands of acres of land to focus the sun on liquid-filled
boilers that create steam to drive electricity-generating turbines.)
Robertson says Amonix plans to build small-scale solar farms
that generate between one and 20 megawatts and that can be plugged directly
into existing transmission lines.
Some solar thermal power plant projects have been stalled by
disputes over their impact on wildlife, the landscape and limited water
supplies. And while large-scale photovoltaic farms don’t consume water to
generate electricity, their lower efficiency requires huge areas of land for
the deployment of solar panels.
Amonix and other CPV companies sidestep some of those
pitfalls as the technology’s higher efficiency means a smaller footprint. No
water is consumed to generate electricity and less water is used to clean the
units as one can produce the same amount of power as hundreds of solar panels.
An Amonix solar farm also can be built on terrain that is not flat, unlike
other solar thermal and photovoltaic power plants.
Robertson claims the capital costs of manufacturing Amonix’s
arrays is about one tenth of those incurred by photovoltaic competitors, an
advantage as the solar business becomes increasingly competitive with the entry
of Chinese companies into the U.S. market.
One potential problem for Amonix could be the sheer size of
its 77-foot by 50-foot solar arrays, which track the sun and which will be
visible for long distances in the desert. Environmental groups already have
objected to the impact of solar thermal projects on desert “view sheds.”
But Robertson said so far he’s received no complaints. “To
be honest, we’ve seen the opposite,” he said. “It’s about the gaudiest, most
gigantic statement you can make if you want to do solar.”
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