Who We Are
Solar Systems is a world leader in electricity production from concentrated photovoltaic power plants using dense array converter technology.
Conventional photovoltaic products use unconcentrated sunlight, or "1-sun" strength. This energy is quite diffuse so large panels of photovoltaic (PV) material must be used. This requires large amounts of silicon and expensive photovoltaic materials. As well, the panels are usually mounted in a fixed position as the cost of tracking the sun for optimum output is difficult to justify.
Solar Systems reasoned that while PV is expensive, steel and glass are relatively cheap. Therefore, if the diffuse sunlight were concentrated onto a small area of high efficiency PV then the overall cost per unit of electricity would be lower than unconcentrated methods. With this premise, Solar Systems designed and refined the concept into the CS500 dish concentrator PV unit.
Solar Systems has been acquired by Silex Solar.
What We Do
The CS500 has 112 curved reflecting mirrors mounted on a steel frame, which tracks the sun throughout the day. The combination of mirror profile, mounting framework and solar receiver are carefully designed to deliver concentrated sunlight energy to each PV module. The tracking mechanism maximises the amount of electricity produced.
The heart of the system is an array of close-packed PV cells that are located in the solar receiver, suspended above the focus of the mirrors. The cells are mounted in a way that allows efficient dissipation of thermal energy as well as extraction of electricity. Since PV performance falls by around 1.7% for every 10°C rise in cell temperature and the sunlight is concentrated 500x, effective cooling is critical to achieve efficient performance. The module also incorporates electrical connections to deliver DC output as well as current and temperature sensors for real-time monitoring.