Tuesday, 05 February 2013 00:00

During the past two years, Cogenra Solar of Mountain View, Calif., has branched out to deploy its unique distributed solar cogeneration system from a single Sonoma County winery to installations at 20 locations worldwide, thanks in part, to CSI’s Research, Development, Demonstration and Deployment Program (CSI RD&D).

“The funding that the CPUC provided through the CSI RD&D Program was instrumental to Cogenra’s success and ability to get traction in the market for our low-cost solar cogeneration solution,” said Ratson Morad, chief operating officer and vice president of research and development. “The funding also helped us to explore new ways of storing energy as heat that can be used on demand.”

Cogenra Solar developed a cogeneration system that captures solar energy as electricity and heat using an innovative high-efficiency, water-cooled PV module. Their proprietary design combines standard photovoltaic technology with concentrating optics, single-axis tracking and a thermal transfer system in an integrated hybrid receiver, producing both solar hot water and low-cost electricity in a single product.

The first commercial-scale installation was at an 180,000-square-foot facility at the Sonoma Wine Company in Graton, Calif. In addition to its electricity consumption, the facility used large amounts of natural gas to heat water for wine processing, sanitation and barrel service. The Cogenra Solar system installed displaces approximately 64,000 kilowatt-hours and 12,500 therms of natural gas annually, meeting 70% of the facility’s energy needs.

“In vetting renewable energy solutions for Graton, we found Cogenra was the perfect match – high impact without high cost,” said Derek Benham, founder and owner of Sonoma Wine Company.

More recently, Cogenra designed their second-generation system that reduces costs by 50% over the baseline system installed at the winery, using research funds provided by CSI RD&D. The new system reduces costs, in part, due to improvements that allow plug-and-play installation, remote monitoring and system control. Cogenra also used CSI RD&D funds to demonstrate the feasibility of a tri-generation system incorporating solar heat, electricity and cooling.

This first installation of the tri-generation system with an absorption chiller was at the Southern California Gas Company in Downey, Calif., in May 2012. For more information about the tri-generation system, visit the project webpage for access to papers, the final report and webinar.

The role of CSI RD&D is to develop and demonstrate improved manufacturing and assembly technologies and to develop novel business models to accelerate the deployment of a concentrating photovoltaic/thermal system.

Innovation Spotlight: Cogenra Solar delivers the lowest cost renewable heat, cooling and electricity on-demand

Cogenra Solar® provides solar cogeneration solutions, producing solar-heated water as well as low-cost electricity – a single array for space and water solar heating, cooling, and commercial, institutional and industrial electricity on-demand.

Using solar cogeneration can reduce a significant portion of customers’ natural gas and electricity consumption, sustainably supplying energy for daily operations. Remote monitoring and diagnostics are included in their installations to maintain optimal output.

The proprietary design of Cogenra Solar combines silicon PV’s proven 35+ year lifetime with concentrating optics and an innovative thermal transfer system.  This cogenerates heat and electricity in one integrated hybrid receiver, while delivering heat, cooling and electricity. The systems are ideal for hospitals, universities, corporate campuses and industrial processing facilities.

Cogenra was a finalist at the Asia Pacific Clean Energy Summit’s Project Financing Challenge in Honolulu, HI this past August. Joe Maroevich, Project Developer at Cogenra, told us: “The conference was a good show and we were able to utilize the face-to-face meetings to further our relationships and discussions, as well as having the opportunity to make new contacts.”

Based in California, Cogenra provides renewable heat, cooling and electricity to customers on five continents across a variety of industries. Clients include: Facebook, US Army, Kendall-Jackson Winery, University of Arizona, and Intercontinental Hotels.

For more information about Cogenra, please visit: http://www.cogenra.com or watch their video at: http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=18413848&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&autoplay=1

Efficient Cogeneration Power For New Facebook HQ

Facebook is ensuring its new headquarters in California is a fit place for sustainable living

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – November 26, 2012 – Cogenra Solar, the leading provider of distributed solar cogeneration solutions for renewable cooling, heat and electricity, today announced it was selected by AlwaysOn as one of the GoingGreen Silicon Valley Global 200 winners.  Cogenra’s innovative high efficiency water-cooled solar photovoltaic (PV) module enables both low-cost PV and harvesting of waste-heat for various applications.

Inclusion in the GoingGreen Silicon Valley Global 200 signifies leadership and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing and entrenched players in green technology. Cogenra was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

Cogenra and the other GoingGreen Silicon Valley Global 200 companies will be honored at AlwaysOn’s seventh annual GoingGreen Silicon Valley, November 27^th and 28^th, 2012, at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco.

“This year’s GoingGoing Global 200 displays a maturity in the green technology industry that makes it very attractive to both investors and innovators,” said Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “Greentech research is maturing rapidly, and as it couples with technology innovators and investors, companies are emerging that have the ability to change the way we live our lives for the better and bring huge returns to their founders and funders.”

The GoingGreen Global 200 winners were selected from among thousands of domestic and international technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists and green technology industry insiders.  The AlwaysOn editorial team conducted a rigorous three-month selection process to finalize the 2012 list.

In the last 12 months, Cogenra has developed over 30 projects to deliver combined solar heat, cooling and electricity at hospitals, universities, corporate campuses, food processing and industrial facilities. Cogenra customers include Facebook, Kendall-Jackson Wines, Clover Stornetta Farms and Tucson Medical Center.

Integrating proven photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies, Cogenra systems generate electricity and use the heat wasted by traditional photovoltaic installations. The captured waste heat is integrated into standard building systems to provide hot water, heating or air conditioning.

Solar cogeneration generates more energy than other solar systems. This powers a rapid economic payback and robust environmental benefits.

A full list of all the AlwaysOn GoingGreen Silicon Valley 200 winners can be found on the AlwaysOn website.

Kendall-Jackson Plans Big Solar Cogen Expansion

Projects planned at three facilities in 2013

Six months after turning on what’s arguably the largest rooftop solar electricity and hot-water cogeneration system in the U.S., Jackson Family Wines is finalizing plans to go even bigger in the next few months with installations in Sonoma and Monterey counties.

The Santa Rosa-based company plans to have combined-heat-and-power systems installed at the Vinwood Cellars production winery in Alexander Valley and at a winery in Monterey County around the beginning of 2013, according to Robert Boller, vice president of sustainability.

“If all goes well, we’ll be the largest user of solar cogen in any industry in the U.S.,” Mr. Boller said.

The company also has called together engineers and experts in heating and cooling systems to devise another cogen system that will generate electricity via natural gas-powered microturbines then recapture combustion heat to preheat cleaning water and recapture heat from the water to keep wine in barrel cellars warm enough to sustain fermentation on cold winter days.

That project is aimed for installation nine or more months after the new photovoltaic-thermal systems. Natural gas could eventually come from the Sonoma County Water Agency’s Farm to Fuel biodigester-biogas power plant project planned for across the street from the Kittyhawk facility, Mr. Boller noted.

In April, Mountain View-based Cogenra Solar installed 96 of its photovoltaic-thermal panels on 9,000 square feet of a roof at Jackson’s Kittyhawk blending and bottling facility near Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport north of Santa Rosa. The Kittyhawk array is rated at 241 kilowatts of electricity production and can preheat 1.4 million gallons of water annually, enough  to wash seven 15,000-gallon and one 100,000-gallon wine tank daily.

Each panel of the array has mirrors that focus sunlight onto photovoltaic cells that produce electricity. A tracking system keeps the panels pointed at the sun throughout the day. Photovoltaic cells typically are around 15 percent efficient in converting solar energy received to electricity, with much of the energy lost to heating the cells themselves.

To boost efficiency in energy conversion as high as 75 percent, the Cogenra panels channel water at 60 to 65 degrees through the assembly that holds the photovoltaic cells. The water cools the cells to boost their efficiency, and heat from the cells is transferred to the water, increasing its temperature to 160 to 165 degrees.

Instead of using energy to heat water by 120 degrees for washing, the preheated water only has to be heated about 20 degrees in a boiler.

The Vinwood system will be sized about 10 percent smaller than the Kittyhawk array, and the one in Monterey will be up to 25 percent smaller, even though the Central Coast facility is larger than Vinwood, Mr. Boller said. One of the challenges in designing photovoltaic-thermal systems for these two facilities is their use of hot water is much more cyclical — peaking around harvest — than that of the continually operating Kittyhawk facility, according to Mr. Boller.

Renewable-energy systems typically are sized based on the largest minimal demand for electricity for a facility, rather than peak demand, which can be much higher. Otherwise, a user would pay a lot more for a system with much more capacity than would be needed most of the time.

Jackson Family Wines’ three-step approach to environmental sustainability — conserve resources through more-efficient procedures, optimize or retrofit equipment to further shrink energy demand and generate renewable energy on or off site — also helps to reduce the size of the energy-generation systems. Similarly, Sonoma County Energy Independence Program started using an efficiency-first requirement before funding property-assessed loans on homes and businesses for solar and  other renewable-energy systems.

Other North Bay solar electricity and hot-water systems installed by Cogenra are a 272-kilowatt system for Sonoma Wine Co. in Graton and a 50.6-kilowatt for Clover Stornetta Farms in Petaluma. Cogenra partnered with One Sun of Sebastopol on the latter project.

To reduce its carbon footprint companywide, Jackson Family Wines has been purchasing renewable energy credits through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership program. In the past three years, the company has purchased 96 million kilowatt-hours of credits of wind-energy production by Native Energy of Burlington, Vt.

Those purchases, including 36,000 one-megawatt-hour credits this year, cover 130 percent of the company’s electricity consumption to include the home consumption of its more than 1,000 employees.

Those credits have cost 80 cents to nearly $1 per megawatt-hour. A typical three-person household in the North Bay consumes roughly 6 megawatt-hours a year.

While the detail of their technologies differ, Chromasun founder Peter Le Lievre told PV-Insider that their products offer very similar benefits to customers, in providing both electricity and hot water. “You need to find customers who need electric power and hot water at the same time,” he says. “Now that’s not every body. But if you have a hospital or a university rooftop and you only put PV on it you’re throwing away 85% of the energy you could be collecting.”

Chromasun came from utility-scale CSP experience and developed the concept of generating both electricity and hot water on commercial rooftops from the frustration of trying to build large utility-scale CSP projects as Ausra, the company Peter Le Lievre founded in 2007 and sold to Areva in 2010 for $275m.

“We were operating in Australia and California, and we spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars in permitting and design, purchasing land and trying to get financing – it gets extremely expensive.”

“With utility scale you need to build a large plant and finance it from scratch; it’s very challenging,” he explains.

“Whereas on a rooftop, you can usually get a sale with a customer who not only owns the rooftop, and can give you permission to use it, but can often write a check for the system.”

Cogenra developed from a silicon background. PV-Insider also talked with Dr. Mani Thothadri of Cogenra, who told us that Gilad Almogy initially founded Cogenra as a purely CPV company.

He had left Applied Materials with the idea that active cooling of a CPV system would make more sense than using passive cooling using designs such as fins to radiate out the heat, where you are dependent on wind convecting the heat away, which would raise module costs.

While removing the heat had begun as an active cooling idea to increase electrical efficiency, it became the cogeneration that characterises the company, by allowing for additional income streams by “utilizing that waste heat and monetizing it.” Instead of relying on passive cooling, they created a hollow stack under the PV for active cooling to extract that heat.

“And then how we use that heat is what separated us, is that we use the heat as hot water. It is a very low hanging fruit.”

Learn as you go

The fundamental decision was made by Cogenra’s CEO Gilad Almogy, “who is a brilliant man,” says Dr. Thothadri “to walk before we run.”

“With rooftops, the economics are very good and the projects are small so you can easily go out and find customers who are willing to pay cash, they are willing to try out new technologies.” As a result, within just twelve months Cogenra has racked up 30-plus projects, after their intial pilot project in Sonoma.

A key issue for the Silicon Valley-based Cogenra was having a managable learning curve – on their own dime. Doing many small projects made it possible to iron out the small issues that come up at a manageable scale, setting up the supply chain, the customers, as a revenue-based company, where “we are not burning up someone else’s money.”

Low cost learning

“With any product,” Dr. Thothadri explains, “there are always going to be small issues, nothing fundamental, but a lot of these little things come up. If you go right away to a very large project, if you are trying to solve these, they’re no longer small, having to fix even a small issue at megawatt scale, can mean a big problem.”

“What happened with all the CPV guys is that they would have all the technology they would prove in their back yard then go out and get a 10 MW project PPA [power purchase contract with a utility] and start building.”

With such a large jump, “every small issue becomes a big one, with all the nightmares, so a lot of projects never got off the ground, or solved all the issues. They were never able to benefit from the scale and the cost curve that would come from just implementing more projects.”

As well as starting small, both chose to go with low concentrating PV. Cogenra concentrates just 8-10 suns, though CPV companies can go up to 500 suns.

“A lot of CPV players are going HCPV, so they can’t use standard silicon. Gallium arsenide cells work better when you’re putting a lot of suns on them – but they’re more expensive, so you need to go high concentration to extract all the energy, so you must have exact tracking accuracy, so your tracking costs increase, and you have to find a way to cool that, so all your costs go up.”

Standard manufacturability

Chromasun is having parts manufactured locally by a tier one automotive supplier (for Toyota) in Australia that is tooling-up to make their modules.

“A car seat is made of metal and electrical parts,” Le Lievre points out. “Our product is metal, glass and electrical parts, so basically these panels are medium technology to manufacture. They don’t require a million dollar factory to put into production. They are a fairly straightforward fabrication.”

No trailblazing

Almogy’s idea was based on standard PV. China was already driving the costs down, so his thought process was that somebody else could spend and do all the hard work, the efficiency improvement, and fights in the marketplace to drive down costs.

“The thing with standard silicon cells is it’s being produced by everybody. It’s available. I come from a semiconductor background, so does Gilad,” points out Dr. Thothadri, who had a similar engineering focus as Dr. Almogy at Applied Materials. “And from that background you never bet against silicon.”

“Just when you think it has hit a brick wall they come up with something or other – and boom. And it is very low cost so it’s just the easiest way to do things.”

Chromasun gave similar reasons for using off-the-shelf PV with silicon, which is why both technologies are low concentrating.

“Silicon is limited by its bandwidth characteristics,” explains Dr. Thothadri. “It is limited to a certain amount of current, or the number of electrons that you can make jump from one bandgap to another.”

However, the trade-off of using low concentrating silicon is low cost. Both technologies wring two to three times more energy from the “low hanging fruit” thermal side. “We are working with a five star hotel in Hawaii that has a $50,000 a month propane bill for hot water, so they are very keen to use solar to reduce those bills, and they are the perfect customers for us,” says Le Lievre.

Both concentrate enough to increase the electrical side efficiencies (20-25% for Cogenra) but not so much that no one can afford their systems – so they wouldn’t get enough repeat business to ever “walk before they can run.”

Le Lievre concedes he will be very happy if he does $10m this year:“I think we’re both trying to unlock a new market together. We wish Cogenra all the best to be very successful. I think we will be too.”