Sunlight Now 50X More Sunny
I love reading stuff like this. Solar technology has made such strides in the last few years and it’s just accelerating. I am excited by President Obama’s initiatives to repair and improve the national electrical transmission grid. With that fixed, solar electricity farms can be created using cool technology like the Light Guide Solar Optic and then that electricity can be transmitted to where it needs to be.
The acrylic component–called a Light-Guide Solar Optic (LSO)–is a new type of solar concentrator that could significantly lower the cost of generating electricity from the sun. Unlike existing designs, there’s no need for mirrors, complex optics, or chemicals to trap and manipulate the light. “It’s pure geometric optics,” says Morgan, director of business development at Toronto-based Morgan Solar.
Solar concentrators have emerged in recent years as a way to intensify the amount of sunlight hitting solar cells, which are the most expensive part of solar panels. To make solar power more affordable, engineers have sought to use less solar-cell material by concentrating sunlight onto much smaller spaces.
A couple of years ago, Nicolas’s brother John Paul Morgan came up with the idea of a solid-state solar concentrator system: a flat, thin acrylic optic that traps light and guides it toward its center. Embedded in the center of Morgan Solar’s concentrator is a secondary, round optic made of glass. With a flat bottom and convex, mirrored top, the optic receives the incoming barrage of light at a concentration of about 50 suns and amplifies it to nearly 1,000 suns before bending the light through a 90-degree angle.
Unlike other concentrators, the light doesn’t leave the optic before striking a solar cell. Instead, a high-efficiency cell about the size of an infant’s thumbnail is bonded directly to the center bottom of the glass optic, where it absorbs the downward-bent light. There’s no air gap, and there’s no chance of fragile components being knocked out of alignment.
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