Last week I posted about a utility-scale concentrating photovoltaic being built in the San Diego–Imperial Valley area using CPV units built by Concentrix, a division of Soitec. Soitec, based in France, is planning on building a manufacturing facility in the region to supply units for the San Diego project, plus for sales to other utility-oriented renewable-energy developers.
Below are two videos about CPV. The first features Concentrix CTO Andreas Gombert, who provides some more details about the science and multijunction technology his company is using. Gombert says in the video that Concentrix is achieving solar-to-grid-AC efficiencies of 25 percent. He also predicts grid parity will be achieved in some world markets in 2012 (for the record, parity probably has already been achieved in isolated areas, such as Hawaii, where carbon-based fuels are expensive and sunlight if available in abundance).
Concentric/Soitec are the only CPV players. The second video features interviews with several companies that also are active in this field.