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Workshop on E.O. 13514

IT Sustainability

Where's the hidden solar installation?

LOCATION A solar concentrator sits on the roof of Building 5800, one of the newer research buildings on the east campus. This location was chosen for access to sunlight and the convenience of integrating the concentrator into the solar laboratory within the building.	TECHNOLOGY There are 168 SunPower Corp. (San Jose, California) modules in the 288 ft by 10 ft collector. LightWave Solar Electric, a Nashville, Tennessee, company specializing in residential solar, installed the array.	INSTALLATION JX Crystals manufactured the single-axis tracking 700-watt total energy concentrator. Low-cost, flat, aluminum mirrors reflect sunlight onto the smaller solar cells in the concentrator. Only one-third of the area of the array consists of solar cells, so the concentrator can produce more energy with fewer expensive solar cells.

This rooftop solar concentrator uses mirrors to reflect sunlight onto solar cells,
which convert the sun's energy into electricity.

OPERATION Data are collected every 8 minutes from the concentrator and sent to JX Crystals. These data are used to verify and enhance the operation of the system, and have been used to improve the manufacturer's next generation of concentrators. The Building 5800 concentrator is proving to be well-suited for the humid and hazy Tennessee climate. The amount of sunlight scattered by the haze in this region poses a technological challenge, but this low-concentration system (3x) effectively concentrates the scattered light. In contrast, the high-concentration (700x and greater) systems commonly used in the desert Southwest are not effective in eastern Tennessee's hazy conditions.	R&D BENEFITS Research using this concentrator involves analyses of the system's performance and of the efficacy of similar systems for future use. ORNL has proposed research to DOE that would enable us to determine how much solar concentration can be used in this area. The R&D and F&O partnership led to their jointly representing ORNL at workshops and professional meetings and paved the way for the two larger tracking and stationary solar arrays on ORNL's campus.	F&O BENEFITS The Energy Policy Act of 2005 (Pub. L. 109-58) requires ORNL to continue to increase the percentage of renewable energy that it uses. ORNL's solar concentrator provided the first beta test of a low-concentration array in the United States. This experience led to the construction of the other solar arrays that offset power used at ORNL.

(Last updated: October 12, 2009.)