Sopogy is counting on its proprietary MicroCSP system and a favourable business environment in Europe as it gears up to expand its operations, writes Ritesh Gupta.

The seven year old US-based company achieved two significant milestones in the latter half of 2008.

The first milestone was at Keahole Solar Power, a MicroCSP farm breaking ground on the Big Island at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii in July 2008.

Then in December 2008, the company entered into a solar power agreement with Spanish solar project developer Inypsa Informes y Proyectos, S.A. and German solar project financer Omniwatt to develop a 50 MW solar power plant by December 1, 2010 in Toledo, Spain.

Background

The MicroCSP concept takes a traditional, large scale, open faced, desert, parabolic trough concentrated solar power panels and shrinks it down to one-fourth of the size. The attraction of the technology is that it allows collectors to be installed on the ground and on rooftops in non-desert areas.

Thermal energy from concentrated MicroCSP generates a high temperature working fluid. The heat energy from the fluid can be used to drive a conventional steam-fired power plant or an organic Rankine cycle system to generate electricity.

The company has developed a collector, manufacturing process and enabling technologies with the goal of making its solutions affordable and easy to install. Owing to local licencing regulations, Sopogy works with project developers and contractor partners to install its technology.

Progress

The company has made progress in the US with developments including the issuance of $35 million in special purpose revenue bonds to assist Sopogy in the development of renewable energy on the Island of Oahu last year. CEO Darren Kimura now sees the need for Sopogy to diversify and become more global going forward.

In 2002, when Sopogy was founded in Hawaii, it focused on meeting the needs of its Hawaii clients. By 2005, the company had expanded to California and the Southwest United States as well as increasing its staff base.

"Our strategy is to bring MicroCSP to key markets which have strong solar resources, supportive governmental policies, distributed generation needs and able project financing," Kimura says.

"Last year, we focused on developing relationships with clients who are highly qualified and experienced in these types of markets with applications ranging from industrial steam, solar air conditioning and power," he says.   

After signing the company's most recent deal in Spain, December last year, Kimura told Pacific Business News: "the best value today lies in the European market". 

Kimura, who is targeting US$1 billion in revenue within the next five years, re-affirms that the company is focusing on distributed generation markets. This translates into many smaller projects in which Sopogy provides its CSP collectors for power, heat and A/C. To achieve this, the company knows that it needs to ramp its manufacturing quickly, whilst contining to maintain quality control.

The efforts so far, according to Kimura, are yielding results.

Sopogy introduced its latest technology, SopoNova 4, in July 2008. Based on MicroCSP Parabolic Trough technology, the product incorporates modularity, customised tracking, efficient shipping, storm protection, and automatic operation.

"Since launching our SopoNova product line, we have reduced our costs and improved our delivery response time by weeks. This gets our technologies to our customers quickly which translates into projects from concept completion in months," claims Kimura.

Sopogy's Spain deal 

The recent deal in Spain, one of the key markets for the development of CSP technology, seems to have come at an opportune time, in terms of the current buzz surrounding parabolic trough power technology.

The first plant backed by this technology, to be deployed in Europe is Andasol 1, developed by Solar Millennium AG, which started its test run in autumn 2008.

The technology was chosen because electricity supplied from parabolic trough power plants is ideal for the electricity demand during the the day, particularly early afternoon when the power demand reaches its peak and solar radiation as well as the power plant output are also at their peak.

As far as Sopogy is concerned, its technology, follows the same concept as a parabolic concentrating collector.

Sopogy is specifically looking to move forward with 1MW to 20MW projects. Traditional desert CSP is limited to high altitude, low humidity and lots of land, whereas Sopogy focuses on markets with a solar power density of 5 kWh/m2/day.

The technology has been designed in a way to bring advantages over traditional concentrating solar thermal including fast deployment, pre-engineered kits in the 1MW, 5MW and 10MW increments and use and support of local labour for on-site installation.

"Because the market is so large, there are uniquely servable sectors," highlighted Kimura, who added that the company has incorporated inputs from Europe, too, in order to gain advantage in product sales and project roll-outs. Sopogy's technologies are built for heavy commercial, industrial and utility sectors which means Sopogy's MicroCSP is ideal for all other markets, according to the company.

According to Kimura, MicroCSP has a niche advantage in terms of speed to manufacture, installation, proprietary energy storage and price. And now the company is increasingly targeting Europe and even other markets such as the Middle East with its solution. 

It is clear that technology companies are counting on the political framework in Spain that allows power plant projects to be put into operation, with attractive energy supply payments for solar-thermal electricity guaranteed by law for 25 years. Solar thermally-generated electricity is currently renumerated with a feed-in tariff of around € 0.27/kWh.

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