Technical
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PYRON SOLAR GENERATOR Space-Developed Concentrating Photovoltaic . . . the most elegant form of renewable electricity.
PYRON SOLAR INC., an R&D company in La Jolla, California, developed in cooperation with Boeing-Spectrolab a novel system to convert sunlight into electricity. This revolutionary design is a low-profile floating system with short-focal-length lenses concentrating direct sunlight by 400X onto photovoltaic cells. These advanced multi-junction cells produce 800 times more electricity than conventional non-concentrating cells the same size. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy confirmed 37.3% efficiency. With these modified space-age cells, PYRON developed a truly 21st-century, Earth-friendly generator, an innovative system with numerous positive implications for the sustainability of global-scale power and a solar-hydrogen economy.
Yield: At 2,850 kWh/m2yr direct-sunlight as in sunny deserts, the annual electricity yield will be 450 kWh/m2year or 450 GWh per km2year.
System Price: The extremely high efficiency and the low material requirements make the new system competitive with conventional power plants. For large Pyron power plants a calculation shows that the price for the high-tech parts including the cell and the material for the low-tech parts will be $2.40 per watt. Depending on where the units are constructed, the labor costs will vary. With manufacture in the U.S. the total cost is estimated to be around $3-4 per watt. |
PYRON-SOLAR, Inc. |