Disruptive Solar Farms With Inflatable Solar Collectors.

Livermore has always been an interesting place for me. I have been visiting Livermore for researching on disruptive technologies. But today I read about very interesting disruptive product that is actually developed in Livermore for solar faming, or large scale solar energy harnessing. The technology utilized is also disruptive as the methodology is. The solar collectors consist of inflated mirror concentrators which gather sunlight and focus it onto photovoltaic cells. These concentrators increase the energy impacting the solar cells many times over and cost orders of magnitude less per collected area than conventional mirrors or conventional solar panels.
The inflatable solar mirrors are much more cost effective to produce and maintain than the conventional polished aluminum mirrors, according to coolearth. The solar cells themselves are far removed from the conventional solar cells, dubbed concentrated photovoltaic cell (CPV), and kept cool using water cooling rather than large scale heat sinks or spreaders used in the conventional solar cells.This reduction of material use comes in handy when deployed in large scale solar farms, which the products are aimed at. If you have seen other solar farms, you know that the area is devoted to solar farming and nothing else could take place in these areas. But the coolearth design allows us to use conventional farms that grow wheat or soy beans to be used for solar energy harvesting. The light weight concentrators and high power solar cells are deployed in truss like structure, a series of support and control cables stretched between poles. By suspending the concentrators, vast areas of land can be easily converted for solar energy production, with limited environmental impact. The ground beneath the concentrators remains free for other uses, such as farming or ranching.
So do not expect to buy one and put it up on your roof top. The technology and methodology is targeted for large scale solar energy production. But you can follow the progress of the company and the products at the coolearth website. You can also read more about the Solar Power 2006 Presentation in PDF format.
tag: solar electric power plant, solar faming, large scale solar energy, solar collectors, photovoltaic cells, inflatable solar mirror, coolearth, concentrated photovoltaic cell, CPV cell, Solar Power