Will a Breakthrough Solar Technology See the Light of Day?

The balance between incident radiation and power produced is an interesting one, a 'perfect' solar panel would remain cold. Solar panels tend to produce less power as they warm up, so the better a solar panel gets at converting power the less it will get warmer! So there is a positive feedback mechanism at work here.

Typical run-of-the-mill cells are 25% (single junction), and on cold clear winter days they can keep that up for quite a while. So that's 250 Watts per square meter of panel.

I did some simulations to figure out the exact gain you could get from perfect seasonal and day tracking, it's about 28%, but no tracking system will ever reach that in practice. Typical reasons why you won't get to perfect: tracking systems tend to hunt the clouds if they are not clock based, otoh if they are clock based they tend to perform badly because they use energy to move when they're not producing energy themselves!

Sunlight per m^2 of static solar panel is Cos[x] - x=0 at midday, x=-pi/2 at sunrise.

Static panel total daily sunlight: Integrate[ Cos[x] ,{x, -pi/2, pi/2}] = 2.

Moving panel total daily sunlight: Integrate[ Cos[0] ,{x, -pi/2, pi/2}] = pi.

Ratio = pi/2 = 1.57.

So a 57% increase in daily power, in theory, near the equator.

But - I have ignored atmospheric absorption - at sunrise, the light goes through more atmosphere to get to your panels - I don't know how much this matters. On slightly overcast days, this is presumably very important - how cloudy is it where you are, in theory? :)

Also, you get power from scattered sunlight. Very roughly it is 10% of your panel's rated power, even when it has no direct sunlight falling on it. These 2 effects reduce the benefit of tracking vs static.

When I was looking at making my own tracking system, I found a Canadian company that claimed (iirc) "30% gain" for their tracking system. I thought 'only 30%, it seems hardly worth it?' (Except for load-balancing reasons).

Other stuff: Most domestic panels are on roofs - they are often not 'ideally sited' - e.g. do not face due south, roofs not steep enough.

Solar power output is a function of the total incident power (~ 1KW/sq meter on a clear day), reflection losses, heat losses, conversion losses and resistive losses. In the case of a concentrator you will also have losses due to imperfect optics (square lenses with a small area collector behind them in this case) and alignment.

As you correctly observe, you can compare tracking conventional to non-tracking conventional.

But in this case you can also compare tracking conventional with tracking non-conventional. The only variable is how you gather the light on the cell in that case, we already know how to track conventional cells.

So if the concentration step makes up for the losses in the optics and the reduced lifespan of the cell (more suns / area -> shorter lifespan!) then they may be in the money.

But with a lens system alignment has to be just about perfect (most tracking systems have a few degrees of error, no problem but for a concentrator with such a high degree of concentration a degree or more might put the spot next to the collector), which means they're going to have to have a very precise drive system on that huge leaf, and it will have to be extremely rigidly constructed so wind pressure on the leaf does not push it off from the ideal angle.

All these are engineering issues that they may have solved but the article does not mention any of that.

If their concentrating trick beats that 44% at 90 degrees to the sun they have a record on their hands, but that does not yet make it a feasible tech, for that it has to be cost effective too.

The collector has to be mass produced cheaply enough and the tracker system can't add too much overhead in cost, disadvantages in shading will have to be overcome by corresponding increases in efficiency.

If all those conditions are met then they're possibly going to end up producing power cheaper than conventional, rigidly mounted cells at ~24% efficiency.

Solar is rapidly headed for a 'piston engine' situation, where conventional cells can be produced so cheaply that better technology will have to overcome a huge advantage in invested $ and economies of scale before it will be considered.

From that point of view I don't think this tech stands much of a chance, it will have to be built to very exact degrees of tolerance, it causes losses because of the tracking (less usable area with a tracked system), it is more expensive to mount and maintain than an untracked system and it still needs to recoup the start-up losses.

That's a large amount of disadvantage to overcome. I've sunk a good bit of money into a tracking system that had some fairly unique properties (the tracking system was relatively rigidly mounted and the collector was stationary, still converted solar to electricity directly) and I think I have a basic grasp of the economies of solar installations. I wish this company the very best and I hope they will make it but I fear that the degree of complexity, the increase in cost per area covered and the reliability of tracked systems in general and this one in particular will not make it competitive.