La Mancha Experiments With Solar Concentrators

The land of La Mancha, made famous by Quixote and his windmills, is a sun-drenched, windy part of Spain. Fittingly, the region is a veritable experimental hot-house for solar concentrator installations. Many start-up companies are at work devising techniques of focusing light on a solar cell, in order to reduce the amount of silicon or other material needed to produce the cell. In La Mancha, they are trying out different types of solar concentrator technologies by incorporating different concentrators into various solar parks, with total capacity of 2.7 MW.

The companies contributing technology to the project are Solfocus (US, 500 KW), Concentrix (Germany, 500 KW), Isofoton (Spain, 700 KW) and Guascor Foton (Spain/US, 300 KW). The project is being organized by the Institute of Concentration Photovoltaic Systems.

Solar concentrator systems are experiencing a very interesting moment worldwide, with record gains in efficiency by Spectrolab (Boeing) and many companies taking their products to market. Spectrolab has an agreement with Solar Systems (Australia) to provide it with 500,000 concentrator solar cell assemblies to be used in remote rural communities.

Via: Technology For Life

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