The technology began on these tropical islands, and currently it has return home to roost, but in a very nice way.
On Dec. 10, the Big Island can power up a four-acre solar farm based mostly on Sopogy technology, which was spun off as Keahole Solar Power LLC to develop the project.
Located on Honolulu, Sopogy’s five hundred-kilowatt concentrating solar array, which is additional efficient than solar photovoltaic systems, can deliver enough electricity to the Huge Island’s power grid to serve 250 homes, consistent with state energy agency estimates.
This amount can facilitate stop 808 metric plenty of carbon dioxide from oil-burning power plants (for that Hawaii is justly infamous), that is the same as preserving virtually 8 acres of forest, planting twenty,176 trees, or eliminating 154 cars from the road. In 2007, Hawaii’s generation mix stood at 68.4-% oil, and 12.5 percent coal, with solely 4.five-% delivered from renewable resources like solar, wind, geothermal and biomass.
Sopogy’s 4-acre solar farm, comprised of 1,000 collectors about twelve feet long and 5 feet wide, will also eliminate the requirement to shop for two,000 barrels of oil, a development which state energy administrator Ted Peck called “exciting”.
The technology itself relies on troughs, or 0.5-barrel-formed solar collectors, that catch, reflect and concentrate the sun’s energy on a central collection bar. The system can head liquids up to four hundred degrees (Fahrenheit), and the heat from the liquid used to produce steam to control a turbine.
The array is being placed alongside Hawaii’s Natural Energy Laboratory (south of Kona International Airport), but a forty four,572-square-foot pilot project in July, engineered by Sopogy and Helio Dynamics (a concentrating solar manufacturer), below the auspices of Southern California Gas (a division of Sempra Energy), proved the technology viable and compared Sopogy’s concentrating solar to larger concentrating trough arrays like Andasol 1 as the “PC size in concentrating solar generation” (versus mainframes).
Sopogy’s collector, originally designed as the SopoFlare™ and destined for the commercial/industrial rooftop market as an alternative choice to solar thermal (solar hot water heating) or photovoltaic technologies, was developed in conjunction with an integrated roof rack mounting system.
All Sopogy’s offerings are primarily based on its MicroCSP™ technology, which can be employed in place of, or hybridized with, power generation systems, chiller (or AC) systems, process heat recovery devices, and even in desalination.
Originally founded in 2002 by Hawaiian-based mostly Energy Industries (an energy product developer) as an energy ideas incubator at the Energy Laboratories website, Sopogy has gone on to become an innovator, offering a product that costs less to manufacture than solar photovoltaic, with concerning twice the efficiency. And, while not as economical as utility-scale solar thermal collections systems, is less costly, provides for energy storage in the dark and on cloudy days, and offers the hope that sometime the technology will be obtainable in residential roof-sized units.
Sopogy is trying ahead to a 50-megawatt project in Spain, and its sister entity, Keahole, is hoping to develop 30 megawatts of concentrating solar thermal throughout the Islands in the following six years.
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