SolFocus expands Greece CPV plans to 10 MW

Mountain View, Calif.-based SolFocus said today it signed deals to grow its concentrated photovoltaic project in Greece from 1.6 megawatts to 10 megawatts, citing the country’s favorable tariffs that encouraged the company’s investors.

SolFocus Vice President of Marketing Nancy Hartsoch told the Cleantech Group that the CPV systems will be installed starting this summer, with the project progressing as fast as the company can ramp production at its manufacturing facilities.

Greece has established a feed-in tariff that pays more than $0.40 cents per kilowatt hour for installations 100 kilowatts or smaller. SolFocus plans to build more than 100 80-kW CPV systems to take advantage of the higher feed-in tariff for smaller systems.

“Sites this small are pretty unique to Greece, but most developments we are looking at are on larger fields,” Hartsoch said. “It’s a function of geography and topography. Both come into play when you look at how Greece is deploying these technologies.”

SolFocus declined to release the cost of the project, or the names of its backers. Estimates are that the project is worth about the same as the company’s $103 million, 10 MW project under development at several sites in Spain (see SolFocus inks $103M CPV deal in Spain).

SolFocus uses mirrors and advanced reflective optics to concentrate the sun 500 times on a small, high-efficiency solar cell, which reduces the overall system cost by using low-cost materials such as glass and aluminum.

SolFocus is currently ramping its high-volume manufacturing facility to reach 100 MW of capacity. The company expects to install between 10 MW and 13 MW of CPV systems this year, and 85 MW in 2010. The CPV systems will be allocated to those projects as soon as possible, Hartsoch said, noting that the Greece installations aren’t expected to be completed this year.

SolFocus originally announced the Greek project in December with Greek renewable energy developer Samaras Group and engineering company Concept.

Hartsoch noted that Greece’s terrain requires distributed generation. There aren’t large swaths of available land, and much of the land is hilly. Additionally, the systems could be used to generate power for Greece’s islands, she said.

While such distributed generation is a new focus for SolFocus, Hartsoch said it could give the company experience for building similar systems for other hilly, island terrains. But the unique characteristics of the Greek projects will present challenges, she said.

“You have to become very, very cost effective because it’s much more challenging to deploy to multiple sites than one big one and keep costs in control,” she said. “You have multiple grid connections, multiple site surveys. We’re trying to keep costs down by using local CPV contractors and not sending out SolFocus installers … and developing site designs and putting them on as many similar geographies as you can so you can do as little customizing as possible.”

SolFocus was able to secure the project financing at a time when many other solar technology developers are selling off their project portfolios (see Solar Sell-off accelerates, First Solar buys OptiSolar's pipeline of projects for $400M, NRG Energy, eSolar sign 500 MW solar deal, and Ausra shaves staff as it chases immediate revenue). The credit crunch has dried up sources of funding for many large-scale projects (see Record 2008 for cleantech with $8.4B in investments).

Hartsoch said SolFocus was able to secure funds because of Greece’s favorable tariff and because SolFocus has already started ramping its manufacturing facility, which requires less capital investment than other solar technologies. Hartsoch estimated that SolFocus can build a CPV plant for $0.15 per watt, while photovoltaic makers require a capital investment of $1 to $1.50 a watt, and thin film producers need $2 per watt.

SolFocus is still raising its Series C round, which is rumored to have reached $66.78 million from firms including Apex Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates and NGEN Partners (see Investors inject new funds in recycling and Good week for auto technology). The company previously raised $96 million in its Series A and B rounds (see SolFocus raises $52M).

The company’s backers include Moser Baer India, David Gelbaum, Metasystem Group, Yellowstone Capital and others.

Greece isn’t expected to be a huge market for solar because its population is just 11 million. But it’s a desirable location because of its high energy generation possibilities and high temperature, Hartsoch said. She estimated that a third of the world’s land, representing about 40 percent of the world’s population, is ripe for CPV developments.

“Greece is very committed to its renewable portfolio standards, so you’re going to see a lot of activity there,” Hartsoch said. “They have some nice incentives and feed-in tariffs, so just as it drove Spain’s market a few years ago, you’ll see it drive the solar market in Greece.”

SolFocus has started site selection and engineering work on some of the projects. Hartsoch said she expects to have the first projects under construction this summer.

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