Energy Matters Presentation

Here are the (slightly modified) slides that I presented at the Energy Matters Conference last week.  I tried to embed audio, but WordPress didn’t like the file format.  I made some modifications to add a little more context here and there.

Edit: There was a small correction needed for slide 19 I uploaded  a new version.

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.

Better with a Candle

I’ll see if I can get a picture of it with a candle inside tonight when it’s dark. Happy Halloween!

Morgan Solar Logo Jack-o-Lantern

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.

Morgan Solar in Greentech Media

We just got writen up in Greentech Media, check it out!  All in all a great article.  The article covers the initial ideas that led to the founding of Morgan Solar, what pushed the innovation and the early process.  We’re going to be releasing more information on the Sun Simba HCPV (very soon) and we’re looking forward to people’s reactions to that as well.

This is not the official Morgan Solar Blog

Morgan Solar

If you’re looking for the Morgan Solar blog or Morgan Solar’s website, you’re close, but not quite there. Follow the links if that’s what you wanted. I maintain both blogs, but this blog is really my personal solar energy blog, with a strong Morgan Solar emphasis. Maintaining an unofficial blog lets me talk about more off-topic things like solar politics, the solar industry, other companies and just random stuff.

Al Gore’s 2018 Carbon Challenge

Solar Politics

It’s a little long, almost 30 minutes, but very cool and I think as a society, we have the technology and the resources to do it, all that’s lacking is the will.  It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be worth doing.  Here at Morgan Solar, we’re going to do our part.  Here’s a quick summary from the Boston Globe.

If we succeed, we create booming new industries, wealth, clean secure energy and maybe we prevent the greatest disaster so far in human history, saving millions of lives while improving billions more.  If we fail, basically it’s business as usual while things slowly get worse all around us.

Cool Solar

Solar energy – using the sun to fight global warming. That’s just too awesome for words. Because solar energy is basically the awesomest (it’s a word) thing, here are some cool solar tidbits I found this week.

• That’s just classy – Kyocera Donates Solar Panels to Primary Schools in Tanzania- Good work guys.
• Pretty cool - Prius To Get Solar Panels.  Seems like a no brainer really.  I prefer to bike, but hey, it’s still cool.
• Two kinds of Awesome – Basically if you take the seventh coolest thing ever, solar power and combine it with the ninteenth coolest thing ever, blimps, you get 200 mph solar-powered flying turtles and Goodyear coming to the rescue during disasters.  Solar blimps are officially the third coolest thing ever and I want, nay demand, to live in a world where solar blimps are everywhere.
• And finally, the coolest thing this week – With oil over $140, GM realized that people aren’t quite so excited about their cars right now, so they decided to do something pretty freaking remarkable.  They’re installing the world’s biggest rooftop solar installation.  It’s not enough to make me want to buy a 2008 Hummer H2 SUV which gets a whopping 11 to 12 mpg.  Still, they make the biggest car, it seems logical they should install the biggest solar array – either way, it’s pretty damn cool.

About Morgan Solar

There’s an “About Us” section in our webpage, and it’s pretty good at telling you one version of “About Us”.  But there is another, more personal version of “About Us’ that might be worth talking about too.

That’s the message I hope to get across here, the “About Us” that can’t be summarized on a web page.  It’s not something that can be captured in a single blog post either, but hopefully, anyone who actually reads this will start to get an idea of who we really are and what we’re really about.

Why do you care about us?  Probably you don’t, and that’s cool, we’re not trying to be popular or famous.  What we’re trying to do is to do something big, something new and something important.  We really do want to make solar energy cheap and ubiquitous.  This matters to us personally and we know it matters to most of the people that might read this blog.  So, you may not care about us, but you probably care about what we’re trying to be a part of.

Our goal here is to talk about our company and the milestones and hurdles as a start-up, to talk about our products and our ideas, about the solar energy industry in general and about the environmental issues we hope to be a part of solving.

Cheers.

Hello World!

Ok, so, this is the first post for the Morgan Solar blog.  We’re a solar energy start up in Toronto, ON, and we’re launching this blog in the hopes of connecting with people interested in solar energy and “Green” start-ups.  There are things we want to talk about and information we want to share, and we’re hoping that people to come to us with the same.

A few specifics – we’re in the final stages of developing our market ready prototypes, and will be unveiling them in September, in time to show them off at Solar Power 2008 conference in San Diego.  We’re going to be running this blog between now and the conference figure out who we can connect with and whether a blog is a good communication tool for us.

We don’t have much in the way of product details yet, but that will change soon – we’re sorting out a few last minute IP issues and then we’ll be putting up lots of details and specs.  We’re a few weeks away from publishing the specifications on our flagship product – the Sun Simba HCPV – a totally different type of Concentrated Photovoltaic system.Once the specs are available we’d be interested in hearing people’s feedback.

However, the main thrust of this blog will be to connect with people, talk about solar, start ups and green energy.

We’re allowing comments for now, but this is a company blog, so we’re being a little on the cautious side there – check our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use if you have a question about that.  Anything else, ask us.

This is us: