Sep 24 2008

GreenVolts Scores $30 Million in Greenbacks

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Amid all the financial doom and gloom this week, San Francisco-based GreenVolts, an award-winning solar power technology startup, offered welcome good news:  It secured $30 million in new venture funding to accelerate advanced R&D efforts and continue work on its GV1 project, billed as "the world's largest non-silicon concentrating photovoltaic power (CPV) plant." (More on what that mouthful means in a minute.)

The news was good not only for the company's founders, but for customers of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., who will likely begin consuming clean energy from the GV1 project before the end of the year.

Last year, PG&E signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with GreenVolts to take two megawatts of power from the eight-acre GV1 solar plant, now under construction in Byron, a rural community in eastern Contra Costa County, just south of Brentwood.

When complete, GV1 will supply enough power to serve more than 1,000 homes--not enough for PG&E's system operators to notice, but big enough to prove the technology and help launch a promising provider of renewable energy.

In an interview with NEXT100, GreenVolts CEO Bob Cart said the company's funding success shows "there is still money available for good quality companies with good business plans and good technology. It's more difficult in today's environment, there's more scrutiny, but with the right fundamentals in place [you can still find] money."

(Indeed, a KPMG survey of 301 venture capitalists, released today, confirms that they are still very bullish on the green technology sector.)

Cart founded GreenVolts in 2005, following an 18-month sailing odyssey that gave him hands-on experience with the promise and pitfalls of living off-grid with solar panels.

Previously he held leadership positions at a precision tool-and-die manufacturer, an Internet advertising company, and a bank.

GreenVolts' technology is based on photovoltaic cells, which convert light energy directly into electric current. But unlike typical rooftop systems that use silicon, it uses less familiar materials like gallium arsenide, germanium, and gallium indium phosphide.

This combination--developed originally for applications in outer space--allows it to capture energy from infrared and ultraviolet as well as visible light, making it almost twice as efficient as most silicon cells.

To offset the cost of these materials, GreenVolts concentrates large amounts of solar energy on its solar cells using mirrors and other optical elements. Each GreenVolts PV cell receives 625 times as much energy as a traditional solar cell of equal size.

This combination of high-efficiency PV cells and solar concentrators will soon allow GreenVolts to produce power at prices comparable to fossil-fuel plants, Cart said: "The cost of traditional modules has declined 20 percent for every doubling of manufacturing capacity; we think we'll be on a similar path."

Any developer of solar technology has to make tradeoffs dictated by the costs of manufacturing, installation, site acquisition, and other variables. In weighing those tradeoffs, GreenVolts concluded that the best way to deliver solar power to customers is through efficient utility-scale plants rather than labor-intensive rooftop installations.

"We can easily deliver power for half the cost or less," Cart said.

But the company also realized that huge solar plants in remote areas bring difficult challenges of their own: getting permits for hundreds of acres of land, often in environmentally contested areas, and building expensive transmission lines to serve them. Both challenges can add years to the final delivery of a major solar plant.

By maximizing efficiency, GreenVolts' technology requires less land for any given output of power. The company aims to build compact solar plants of modest output, typically from 1 to 20 megawatts, which can be sited near existing utility distribution substations, dramatically reducing project completion time and cost.

Of course, GreenVolts will need a lot of projects to equal a 500 MW solar plant being developed by one of its competitors.

"There's no single solution that's best for every area," Cart concedes. "It is going to take a combination of many different technologies to provide clean energy and we see CPV as major part of the solution."

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