SkyFuel sheds light on giant solar collector

Albuquerque, N.M.-based SkyFuel unveiled today a giant solar parabolic trough unit that the company says costs 35 percent less than other commercially available models.

And by other models, the concentrated-solar company specifically means one used by Spanish energy developer Acciona’s 64-megawatt Nevada Solar One facility.

The comparison may have been deliberate: The parabolic troughs for Nevada Solar One and the SkyFuel's SkyTrough system were both designed by SkyFuel’s CTO Randy Gee.

Chris Huntington, SkyFuel’s vice president of business development, said the SkyTrough concentrator alone will cost 35 percent less than the one used by Nevada Solar One, he said, while the complete SkyTrough system will cost 25 percent less than Acciona’s facility.

Nevada Solar One went online in June 2007 and has a solar field 300 acres in size (see Biggest solar thermal plant in 16 years connects to Nevada grid).

SkyFuel introduced the SkyTrough, a 375-foot long, 20-foot tall concentrator that is rated to produce 150 kilowatts of solar energy.

See the SkyTrough here>>

Huntington declined to name a price for the full SkyTrough system but told the Cleantech Group that he expects it to cost $2 per installed watt.

The reflective material used by SkyFuel is part of the reason the SkyTrough system is 50 percent cheaper than that of other commercially available systems, Huntington said. The company uses a proprietary Mylar-like reflective, flexible polymer instead of glass. Tests conducted by National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which was involved in the development of the SkyTrough, found the ReflecTech material also had a marginally higher reflective value than the glass used in other solar collectors.

ReflecTech is priced online at $1.55 to $3 per square foot, depending on the quantity needed to cover a collector’s surface. And while it may not shatter like glass, it’s not impermeable either.

“A rifle can put a hole in it,” Huntington said. He also pointed out that the material has been used at a solar electric generator facility in California for nearly six years and has yet to be replaced.

The SkyTrough system is expected to be tested at either one, two or three sites next year, Huntington said. SkyFuel is currently negotiating for six projects, in the United States and abroad, in which the SkyTrough system is expected to be installed and connected to the grid.

The projects are planned to range in size from 2 megawatts to 200 MW. Huntington said the first three locations are likely to be small-scale demonstrations (2 MW to 10 MW) at desert sites. One facility is in Arizona, another in California and a third is in a country that Huntington wouldn't name.

After that, Huntington said, there are three other project sites, possibly as early as 2011.

Huntington declined to name the company’s potential clients for these ventures, saying only that their customer base included independent power producers and "unregulated subsidiaries of utilities."

SkyFuel is also studying how the SkyTrough system might be used for the Hawaiian electricity market, Huntington said. The state has the most expensive electricity rates in the nation, charging $0.28 per kilowatt-hour, while the national average is $0.09 per KWh.

Another long-term plan involves SolarDunes, a 1,000-MW solar energy park SkyFuel announced plans to build two years ago, though the technology to be used there is expected to be different from the SkyTrough. SkyFuel recently completed a $17 million round of funding led by Leaf Clean Energy (see Cleantech investments hit a record high). Huntington said SkyFuel is considering another round next year.

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