Solar Direct Savings

A British company is reinventing and refining a US-originated ‘cogeneration’ hybrid concept in an attempt to improve the efficiency of conventional PV panels and, at the same time, add water heating abilities to the system.

In the US, California’s Cogenra Solar is one of a few companies producing cogeneration systems already, but there are major differences in the way they work. Cogenra is a motorized system that tracks the sun’s movements, using curved solar panels to focus light and pipes containing the water to be heated running behind them.

A new solar hybrid product, called Virtu, has been presented to potential investors in the US as an answer to the issue of what happens when solar photovoltaic cells get too hot. Vexingly, as conventional flat panels are presented with too much heat at any one time, such as at midday, this can affect efficiency, opposed to at other times of the day. Whilst this is often a problem in hotter climates such as America, conventional solar pv panels are often at their most efficient in cooler climates such as the UK.

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No, you won’t need to wear special glasses to enjoy the benefits of solar power generation, but a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that the conventional way of arranging solar cells in flat panels angled to face the sun may not be the best way to organize them, and that cube, or even tower-shaped solar cells might be a better design, especially for locations far north of the equator, such as northern Alaska or Tierra del Fuego, where the sun never gets very far above the horizon for much of the year.

Researchers led by Jeffrey Grossman, associate professor of power engineering, tested a huge variety of configurations at different latitudes in a computer simulation, then built three of those designs, putting the panels on the roof of an MIT building.

They discovered that the new designs, combining horizontal and vertical panels, produced 20 times more power than flat panels occupying the same amount of space. Vertical panels will pick up more energy in the mornings and evenings, while horizontal or angled panels perform better at noon, particularly at high latitudes. Motorised solar panels have been used to track the sun, but eat up much of the energy they store themselves.

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