Hi Ben,

I saw your recent blog entry where you mused on the clutter in the PV concentrator space and the fact that such clutter in the market normally points to some sort of shakeout.

I just wanted to respond briefly to you personally to give you our take on this.

Really, it comes down to the difference between market and technology. Concentrating PV is a technology as opposed to a market, and different CPV companies are attacking different markets.

I believe that your argument could apply to many concentrator companies in that the majority of CPV companies are going after the utility/wholesale electricity market, so that market could end up rather crowded. There’s also the possibility that solar thermal may win out over CPV for utility-scale applications – they will get the kinks worked out of that technology eventually, and CPV will have cost challenges in the medium term to compete with wholesale electricity rates. Utility-scale CPV will survive as long as it’s subsidized, but may have difficulty beyond that.

The other important piece of the market is distributed generation, where CPV can compete against much higher retail rates, and in the case of commercial buildings, compete against peak electric rates that may be 2-3 times the base rate.

One piece of this distributed market is addressed by low-cost, low(er)-efficiency non-tracking low-concentration modules that can take the place of traditional modules. These products have efficiencies that are below the industry average for traditional solar panels, but they will compete on price in the near term, until the price of silicon drops by a factor of two or so (at which point the cost of concentration will exceed the savings of using 2x less silicon). In terms of market, these products can go anywhere traditional PV goes, so commercial, residential, or utility. Presumably the companies taking this approach have future generations of product planned to provide business continuity for the day when silicon prices drop.

Another segment of the distributed market, specifically addressed by a much smaller number of companies, is the commercial rooftop market, where high efficiency, a low profile, and the added power benefits of tracking are important to businesses whose power consumption is much greater than their rooftop’s capacity for solar. Two key players in that market are Energy Innovations and my company, Soliant Energy. Within that market, I believe that Energy Innovations is targeting a low(er)-efficiency (in terms of total energy output per roof area), low-cost product, while we are going to deliver a very high efficiency product. In Soliant’s case, by leveraging the efficiency of triple junction cell technology and a novel product architecture, we believe that we will deliver more power per square foot to commercial rooftops than any other product you can buy. We are targeting the high end of the market – basically, our approach is to use CPV technology to out-Sunpower Sunpower.

This will serve the market of commercial building owners (or Power Purchase Agreement providers) that wish they could put more solar on their roof but run out of real estate. This is a very large segment of the market – at present, the vast majority of commercial solar deals fill the entire roof of the building and still meet well less than 50% of the business’s energy needs.

That said, we aren’t throwing in the towel on price, either. We intend to also use CPV’s cost advantage to deliver those extra watts at a lower cost than traditional solutions.

Soliant and EI are the only companies I know of that are specifically targeting the commercial rooftop. (Of course, we will also be competing with all the other solutions that are compatible with commercial rooftops, including traditional PV and low-X non-tracking concentrators). Within that space, we and EI are steering in different directions, so I believe that there will be room for both of us in that market.

Within the commercial rooftop space as a whole, Soliant is the only CPV company I know of that is targeting the high performance end of the market.

To recap simply, CPV companies all share a common technology, but we are attacking different markets within solar.

Thanks for mentioning us, and thanks for all the great work on your site and your blog.

Best Regards,

Brad