Harnessing Sun's Energy, at Half the Price
Posted on: Monday, 19 May 2008, 18:00 CDT
By Tech Bytes ANDREW WEBB Of the Journal
Arnold Leitner, whose Albuquerque solar power startup Sky-Fuel just closed a multimillion dollar venture capital round, says the timing could not be better as he sets his sights on marketing to power producers.
The cost of natural gas -- used almost exclusively to provide "peak demand" power on hot summer afternoons -- is skyrocketing. And SkyFuel's new utility-scale SkyTrough technology, he says, is close to meeting the company's goal of halving the cost of existing solar thermal electricity generating technology.
"The ceiling is coming down, and the floor is rising," Leitner says.
Founded in New York in 2005, and relocated to Albuquerque a year later, SkyFuel is developing parabolic trough solar concentrators -- basically, a narrow, U-shaped mirror that reflects and concentrates sunlight on liquid inside a glass receiver held at the mirror's focal point. Fluid inside the receiver, in this case molten salt, collects energy in the form of heat, which is used to make steam to drive conventional electric turbines without producing any harmful emissions.
Typically, a field of parabolic mirrors capable of generating about 1 megawatt of electricity, enough for about 800 households, would be about the size of a football field.
To account for when there is no sunlight, such as overcast days, concentrated solar power systems like this use a tank to store heated material for later use.
The technology is not new -- a solar trough generator was built in California in the 1980s, and several are now in use around the world.
But SkyFuel's technology aims to make this form of renewable energy more attractive to power generators by lowering the costs at several levels, including use of a light, reflective polymer film called ReflecTech that replaces fragile glass mirrors, a low-cost, highreliability space frame to hold the troughs, and a proprietary software to efficiently manage all facets of the system.
"The SkyTrough relies on a proven technology, but re-engineered with an emphasis on lowering cost while improving performance," Leitner says. "It's clear the technology worked, but it's always been a question of cost. That's what we're trying to change."
SkyFuel's prototype was built with a $250,000 federal grant, and the company later raised about $1.3 million in Series A investment. Its technology is currently undergoing validation testing at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
Late last month, SkyFuel closed on a$17 million, Series B venture capital round led by Leaf Clean Energy Co., a publicly-traded green technology investment company based in the U.K.
"This is a great opportunity for Leaf to partner with a leading (concentrated solar power) technology provider," Leaf Chairman Peter Tom said in a news release.
The firm plans to use the funding to deploy the SkyTrough technology later this year. The first installation will be a 1.5 megawatt facility for a privately-owned manufacturer in Mexico. Future customers, Leitner says, will likely be electricity providers seeking reliable, emissions-free alternatives for peak demand plants, or "peakers," which typically fire up during the afternoon as daily energy use reaches its highest point in the day.
"We're approaching independent power producers and unregulated utility subsidiaries," Leitner said.
In the next five years, during which fossil fuel energy costs are widely expected to continue their meteoric rise, Leitner says SkyFuel plans to introduce a second technology, the Linear Power Tower. Unlike SkyTrough systems, in which each row of parabolic mirrors has its own receiver, the Power Tower uses rows of mirrors to concentrate energy on a single, centralized receiver, reducing complexity and allowing for higher temperatures, which, in turn, can create more electricity.
SkyFuel employs about 20, divided equally between offices here and in Denver. Rather than manufacture its own systems, SkyFuel purchases from suppliers, including Arvada Colo.-based ReflecTech Inc., and Schott Solar, which is building a plant in Albuquerque where it will manufacture solar receivers and other technologies.
Lumidigm Tech Used For Biometric System
Alphatronics, a 20-yearold European firm that builds outdoor access control systems, has tapped Albuquerque's Lumidigm to build components for its first "biometric" system.
Lumidigm makes fingerprint sensors that use light to detect subdermal structures, such as capillaries, that make up the foundation of fingerprints. Coupled with software, the systems can reliably provide positive identifications, prevent spoofing, and are unaffected by weather or skin conditions.
Used to limit access to buildings and other facilities, Alphatronics current technologies include card readers, barcode scanners, intercom systems, button and touch-screen displays and other systems.
Lumidigm's recentlyreleased Venus series of lower-cost, ruggedized fingerprint scanners will be adapted into a new product from Alphatronics, the Fingerscan biometric module.
"Over the years, we have been wary of including biometrics in our product line because of concerns about performance in harsh, real world environments," Alphatronics general manager Joost Boel said in a news release. "When we saw the Lumidigm sensor, we knew immediately that we could confidently offer this biometric option to our customers."
Andrew Webb covers technology for the Journal. You can reach him at 823-3819 or awebb@abqjournal. com
(c) 2008 Albuquerque Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Albuquerque Journal
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