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Soitec to build world’s biggest solar power CPV plant in Imperial County

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Concentrating Photovoltaics (CPV) unlike CSP uses Solar Light to generate Energy rather the Solar Heat.Also it uses Optics to increase the Efficiency of Photovoltaic Cells generally made of Crystalline Technology..CPV is making a comeback as traditional c-Si based cells  are reaching the upper limit of their efficiency.Sunpower which makes the most efficient PV cells recently said that it would look at CPV technology to improve the efficiency of their 24% cells further.

CPV companies have recently started winning some utility scale power plant projects  with Amonix wining a deal to supply 30 MW for a project being built for Xcel Energy.Now speciality wafer French company Soitec subsidiary Concentrix has won a massive 150 MW solar plant order from Tenaska Solar Ventures to produce 150 MW which will be supplied to Californian utility  San Diego Gas & Electric under a PPA signed earlier.Note California has a RPS to generate 33% of its electricity from Renewable Energy Sources.Soitec will also build a new factory in the San Diego region to manufacture its proprietary CPV modules with  200 MW capacity.Note this will be the  largest CPV plant in the world when built by 2015 much bigger than any CPV plant on the drawing board right now.This also pushes Soitec ahead of the other US CPV companies like Amonix,Solfocus

Soitec Announces Major U.S. CPV Solar Power Project

Soitec (Euronext Paris), a world-leading supplier of advanced solutions for the electronics and energy industries, today announced that its Concentrix concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) technology has been selected by Tenaska Solar Ventures to produce 150 megawatts (MW) of clean energy for San Diego Gas & Electric. The new CPV solar power plant, named Imperial Solar Energy Center (ISEC) West, will be constructed on a 1057-acre site in Southern California’s western Imperial County, and is expected to be completed in 2015.

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Abhishek Shah

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