Sunball Nears Commercial Production

Green and Gold Energy, Australia, keeps moving foreword on an impressive track to bring its products to the market.  Twelve 1m² SunBall™ Thermal Appliances units (shown) have been successfully built and are being used for tests and marketing. Four units are installed on the roof of Green and Gold Energy.

As described in a previous post the SunBall has the following features:

• Very high (35-38%) efficiency Spectrolab solar cells developed for the space industry.
• A low cost acrylic 500 sun Fresnel lens concentrator
• A heat sink that keeps the cells cool, at only 10 ⁰C above ambient
• Dawn to dusk tracking
• Requires ~ 1/4 the roof space of conventional flat panels

This appliance is claimed to be able to produce electricity at prices competitive with the grid, with a cost of ~US$1,100 per unit, or US$3.33/W, US$0.067/kWh (no rebates) or ~AU$1,467 per unit, or AU$4.45/W, AU$0.089/kWh.  In multi-MW installations the price can be reduced 40-50%.  Each unit is rated at 330 W

Deliveries to Australian customers will start in February and export orders in July.  Their production schedule is for 100 units in February, 200 units in March, ramping up to 3,500 units per month in December 2006 and 5000 units per month by March 2007.  They currently have about 1000 orders (letters) of intent, with 35% of the cost due to firm up the order and the remainder when the unit(s) are shipped.

Resources:

Green and Gold Energy, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
The Green and Gold SunBall™ technical brochure  gives more details about the appliance.
A RENergy article that summarizes the status of the companies activities can be found here.

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Comments

[Eric Blair]

The concentrator idea has been done before - Midway Labs.

My 'big concern' is the effect of the broadband radiation on the lifetime of the solar cell.

Concentrated sunlight should mean a shorter cell life. I've not seen a lifetime projection.

[Jim from The Energy Blog]

The cells used in the SunBall are very rugged, NASA has put them through exhaustive life testing, they are the ones used on the Mars rovers. There are other solar concentrators, but none are so well conceived, compact, sturdy, inexpensive, or easy to maintain as the SunBall.

[eric blair]

The cells used in the SunBall are very rugged, NASA has put them through exhaustive life testing,

Which is all fine and good, but I've still not seen what the lifetime is going to be.

Doped silicon will fail over time due to migration and phyiscal breakdown. Sunlight concentration should speed up that breakdown. So I'm not convinced (yet) when it comes to concentrators VS other cell technologies.

(What I find interesting is the one polar group with Shell panels. They are getting 3X the normal output. But then again, all around the panel is one big heat sink.)

There are other solar concentrators, but none are so well conceived, compact, sturdy, inexpensive, or easy to maintain as the SunBall.

Errr, that is 'marketing hype' more than actual fact. If you had Midway-made units, or any of the other kinds of concentrators that are/were in production, then compared 'em to the production sunball, then such a claim could be made.

Right at the moment however 'none more compact' - the unit at Energy Innovations looks like it displaces less volume of space than the sunball. (Therefore, less problems under high wind) Well concieved? I thought Midway was a good plan - and it didn't work out. Inexpensive - Again, time will tell. Easy to maintain - Again, without comparisons - hard to say.

I DO like the idea of a sunball on a roof as a 'light pipe' to bring in natural sunshine/heat. And I'd buy two less the PV parts for that purpose on a home I'm re-habbing.

[Chad]

The Green and Gold has a website you can do some research with. Basicly they are saying they have a passive heat disappation system that actualy makes the Sunball cooler than tradition solarpanels. They are also doing some testing on the Sunball to see just how rugged it is. Right now they are projecting the life of the Sunball to be 25+ years.