Green and Gold Energy of Australia just released this picture of their Sun Cube rooftop concentrating solar photovoltaic module. Shown left: 600 711kWh/year SunCube Mark 5 Solar Appliance™ with toughened glass lenses, internal 2 axis tracking motors / grid connect inverter.
Retail cost of the AC SunCube = AU$1,500 inc GST at 10%. Cost in the US is expected to be US $1,000.
Their website states: We anticipate the SunCube development process will be completed by the end March 2007 with the first Adelaide installations occurring before the end of April 2007.
According to their discussion group, there are at least several months of backorders in the queue.
SunCubes are not available for export, but will be built by local licensees. As far as I have been able to determine, outside of Australia there are licensees in Korea, India, Malta, Spain, Portugal, Israel, and Italy with ongoing negotiations in several other countries.
The Australian production is to proceed as follows:
1) Initial 1,000 SunCube per month manual assembly line - in
progress now
2) 5,000 SunCube per month manual assembly line - to be
operational mid 2007
3) 50,000 SunCube per month robotic assembly line - to be
operational end 2007
4) Many more of the 50,000 robotic lines - as required by the market
More details on Green and Gold can be found in this previous post, from there you can follow links back to earlier posts.
Dear Greg
Great idea..Here is my idea on getting off the grid cheaply
I am thinking of making my own suncubes, by using recycled fresnel lenses from flat broken flat-screen TV's, as well as using cheap broken or chipped solar panels from whatever sources, and fixing them by resoldering the wiring together onto a plywood backing. If that does not work I want to focus my array of cheap recycled fresnel lenses, onto a stirling engine or some kind of step-up stage steam engine.
If anyone has any other idea on how to make this simple and cheap so we can be independent, please let me know
P.S 911 was an inside job - watch 911 mysteries on video.google.com for free for proof
Posted by: IamThatIam | August 19, 2008 at 12:30 AM
Must not have had that much impact, haven't seen them around as of yet. Maybe a late start. The thing is about solar power technology is that it's developing so fast now, once you come out with a product and finally market it, there's already the next big thing.
Posted by: Josh Manning | July 21, 2010 at 11:12 PM
great post, always something very post in this site, lots of discussion, help post for the people who would have interest about green power
Posted by: make solar panels | April 15, 2011 at 05:19 PM