Morgansolar.com Updates

We hadn’t updated the Morgansolar.com site in a while, and there were some changes that were overdue.  We’ve updated the product photos, descriptions and a few small details about the LSO.  Most of these changes were to account for the transition from the triangle LSO design to the square LSO design.

Trianlge to Square LSO Design

This change allowed us to reduce dead space on the panels (the edges of the optic have a small moulding flange, but it added up) and makes assembly and manufacture easier. It also allowed us to use less aluminum per panel, so in general, it was a big improvement over the previous design. We had always planned to transition to this design, but there were some technical challenges we needed to solve first. When a supplier delay in September forced us to wait a couple of months, we used the time to tackle the challenges and migrated to the current design ahead of schedule.

The new Sun Simba HCPV based on the square LSO design looks like this:

Sun Simba HCPV Design - A high efficiency concentrating photovoltaic solar panel.

And the product section has been updated to reflect the design changes.

We’re getting very close to having working prototypes of our other products, and we already have working prototypes of the Simba, so things are fairly exciting around here.  There are some more photos on our Flickr page.

Ontario Clean Air Alliance – Talk to George Smitherman

Ok, just for those in the GTA.  In Mississauga tomorrow (Tuesday, Oct 28th), there’s an Open House and Town Hall style meeting with the Ontario Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, George Smitherman.  I’ll be there and so will some people I know who are working on developing solar energy installations under the Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program (RESOP, or sometimes just SOP).  Might be interesting.

Also, if you read this and you know ANYONE who knows ANYONE who is developing an installation under the RESOP program, be they farmers, people putting panels on their roofs… anyway, please call or email me.  I want to talk to them.

Open House Details:

Talk to George

Want to give Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman your thoughts on the best ways to address climate change and ensure a sustainable electricity system for our children? The Minister is hosting a town hall meeting in Mississauga tomorrow night to specifically discuss Ontario’s long term energy needs and how the Southwestern GTA factors into it. This is also a great chance to see how the Minister plans to walk his talk on a greener electricity system and to take a new approach to reducing the environmental footprint of our currently heavy energy use.

WHERE: RBC Theatre in the Living Arts Centre, 4141 Living Arts Drive, Mississauga
WHEN: Tuesday, October 28, Open House: 5 – 7 PM and Town Hall Meeting: 7 – 9:30 PM.

Please pass this message on to your friends.

Thank you.

Jessica Fracassi, Communications & Membership Director
Ontario Clean Air Alliance
402-625 Church St, Toronto M4Y 2G1
Phone: 416-xxx-xxxx ext xxx*
Fax: 416-xxx-xxxx*
Email: xxxxxx@cleanairalliance.org*
Website: www.cleanairalliance.org
Website: www.OntariosGreenFuture.ca

Edit: Jessica isn’t in the office today, so if you want to talk to anyone over there, contact Darcy Higgins, darcy@clearnairalliance.org or call 416-926-1907 ext 246.  (He’s a friend of mine and a great guy to boot.  You can check out his personal blog too.)

Oh, and people really liked the photos last week, so here’s one of the very first prototype tests from around 2 years ago.  Crude, but it worked.

Early Simba Prototype - Summer 2006

LSO Pictures

So, we’ve been busy applying for different programs and getting some documentation ready for a few people and we realized that we didn’t have a photo of one of the really cool looking prototypes.  JP and I got out into the sun yesterday and snapped a few, and they came out really well.

The LSO in these photos was cut on a diamond turning machine, and in this configuration is a disc, concentrating to the centre.  The LSOs in the Simba panels are triangular, but they’re basically just pie slices out of the disc version of the optic.

JP holding an LSO Prototype

JP wasn’t posing or anything, I just got him in the shot and it came out looking really cool.  Here are some good images of the LSO itself.

LSO with bright spot in the centre

Two things to note here.  First, at the viewing angle of the photo you can sort of see JP’s hand through the optic, but the LSO’s shadow is just as dark as JP’s hand’s shadow – it’s completely blocking the direct light.  Second, that bright spot in the centre is concentrated light reflecting off glitter (like from a craft store) suspended in silicone gel.  You need something in the centre to scatter the light, or it would just shine right through to the other side and out the far edges.  In the photos it’s saturated, but standing there, it was too bright to look at directly.

The concentration where it strikes the silicone is around 50 suns, although if you popped it out (and you could, easily) and put a point target in the very centre, you could go up to 1000 suns or beyond with this prototype.

LSO Prototype edge view

Here’s the view edge on – looking through the LSO at the bright spot in the centre.

Pretty cool eh?

HCPV Systems

When talking about investors, people often talk about how you need to communicate what your “magic” is.  What is it that you can do that makes your company special.  And here at Morgan Solar, our magic is in our optics, the Light-guide Solar Optic (LSO).  We can make optical concentration systems that just behave differently, and let us design systems that cost less and work better.  That’s our magic.

But to people on the outside, it’s not always 100% clear what we’re doing with those optics.

HCPV and LCPV

HCPV Systems

HCPV – High Concentrating Photovoltaic systems.  Basically, when talking about concentrating photovoltaic systems, people usually divide the marketing into high and low concentration systems.  There doesn’t seem to be a hard number, but concentration factors over 50 or100 suns are usually considered high concentrating, and low concentration systems usually have concentration factors of 2 suns to 20 suns.  That’s a rough generalization though, there’s no official standard or anything.

Our first project, the one that we’ve talked about and blogged about the most is the Sun Simba HCPV.  This system is based on using the LSO optics to produce between 800 and 1400 suns of concentration.  In layman’s terms, 1000 suns concentration means the sunlight striking the surface of the LSO is redirected to shine out of a point on the edge that is 1/1000th the size of the surface.  So, we can use 1/1000th as much photovoltaic material (PV), and still generate lots of power.  So we’re trading the cost of PV for the cost of a 5 millimetre thick sheet of acrylic.

There’s much to be said about this product, but something I specifically wanted to mention here is that when you’re concentrating light at those levels, you have to track the sun.  So these panels are being designed for ground mounted tracker systems that follow the sun very accurately.  Even if it wasn’t a requirement, when you’re designing systems for solar farm scale applications, adding tracking dramatically increase your total output, and more importantly, your output in the late afternoons and early evenings when electricity demand is the highest.  So the tracker is both a requirement and a benefit.  So for interested home users, this is more realistic in a community co-op model rather than installations at individual houses.

We’re installing a demonstration system at the Earth Rangers Centre, and we’ll be exhibiting another system at the Solar Power International 2008 show.

We’re also working on some LCPV systems, a solar window and a solar wall that concentrate in the 4 to 10 suns range.  I’ll talk more about those in a future post.

Sun Simba HCPV Early Details

Projects

We’re pretty close to releasing the full specifications and images for the Sun Simba HCPV system, and will be uploading images here and on the website fairly soon.  We’re putting together the final details of the spec sheet right now, and are looking forward to having the working demonstration system available in September.

The Sun Simba HCPV is based on the best implementation of the Light-guide Solar Optic (LSO), which is described in high-level detail the technology section of our website.  It’s a pretty amazing system.

Some of the key advantages of the Sun Simba HCPV:

• Low cost – We’ll definitely be able to sell our panels at a significantly lower cost than most other CPV systems on the market.  Reasons:
  • We use very few materials compared to other systems – less material equals lower weight and less cost.
  • Our manufacturing processes are extremely simple and can be 100% automated.
• Low profile – The LSO allows us to build a panel that is only 3cm (<1 inches) thick.
• Low Wind Load – We have a simple innovation that allows for lower wind loading on the panel, even when in full wind facing position.
  • Combined with the low weight and low profile of the system, this leads to additional savings in the tracker.
• No Overheating – We don’t have any overheating issues, not that we’ve found ways to deal with overheating, our system doesn’t overheat.
• No Thermal Expansion Problems – We don’t have any thermal expansion issues, our system expands evenly, with no thermal misalignments.
• High Concentration – Our concentrator technology very easily scales up to 1400 suns concentration in the current implementation, and with modifications can achieve up to 5000 suns concentration (which we’re considering for solar chemistry and other super high temperature industrial applications).
• High Efficiency – There is an absolute minimum of sun exposed surface that isn’t capturing light, and very few losses in the optics, so the system functions at near the theoretical limits of efficiency for CPV systems.
• Unique - We don’t use lenses or reflectors – our system is unique so our advantages can’t easily be replicated in other systems.

We’re a couple of weeks away from being able to go into more details, and are arranging renderings right now so expect to hear more about this soon.