Albuquerque, New Mexico June 23rd, 2009: SkyFuel, Inc. has signed an agreement with Sunray Energy, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Cogentrix Energy, LLC, for the installation of SkyTrough™ collectors at Sunray's 43 MW parabolic trough generating plant near Daggett, California, formerly known as Solar Energy Generation Systems I and II ("SEGS I & II"). The agreement with Sunray Energy, Inc., allows for the first commercial installation of the SkyTrough™, an advanced parabolic trough concentrator, which uses glass-free ReflecTech® Mirror Film reflectors. The agreement allows SkyFuel to integrate an array of SkyTrough™ solar collector assemblies into the Sunray plant to demonstrate their commercial viability in a full-scale, solar generating plant application. The SkyTrough™ installation is to be operational later this year. No business terms were disclosed.
“We are pleased to work with one of the premier companies in power generation, Cogentrix, and the operators of Sunray—the place where utility-grade parabolic trough technology was born,” said SkyFuel founder and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Arnold Leitner. “This deployment is the next step in our process to verify the low cost and high performance of the SkyTrough™ a process that began in 2008 with design and component testing, continues with independent testing by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (“NREL”) and Sandia National Laboratories, and since March of this year also includes testing of the heat transfer fluid loop at our Colorado R&D Center. Now the SkyTrough™ takes the next step with integration into a commercial power plant.”
The SkyTrough™, first introduced to the market in October 2008, offers a dramatic departure from the prior state-of-the-art for parabolic trough concentrating collectors. The most striking difference is that the SkyTrough™does not use glass mirrors. Instead, the SkyTrough™ employs a new mirror system with an advanced material called ReflecTech® Mirror Film as the reflecting surface. SkyFuel co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Randy Gee developed ReflecTech® with scientists at NREL. The goal was to replace traditional glass mirrors which can shatter under operating conditions—resulting in considerable expense to replace the mirror panels and any receiver tubes damaged by flying glass shards.
The SkyTrough™ mirrors are constructed of a revolutionary rib-and-panel design that provides high optical accuracy and results in a mirror surface for each parabolic trough module that is continuous from rim to rim and virtually gapless in between the panels. The ReflecTech® mirrors are the most visible part of the many, significant innovations that have been introduced into the SkyTrough™ to reduce cost and improve reliability. Other improvements include a lightweight aluminum space frame that rapidly assembles in the field and a robust helical drive and wireless controller for tracking the sun.
“Everything about the SkyTrough™ design is informed by previous generations of parabolic troughs, but we have especially focused on cost reduction and improved reliability, while also considering how the systems would be manufactured, transported and assembled in the field,” said SkyFuel Chief Technology Officer Randy Gee. “We maintained two overriding design principles when we started work on the SkyTroughTM: improve every single component of a parabolic trough and make it less expensive. The project at Sunray will help us demonstrate that we’ve achieved those goals.”
Construction of the SkyTrough™ installation at Sunray’s plant will begin in the current quarter with completion and commercial electricity production scheduled for the end of 2009.
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SkyFuel, Inc. is a solar thermal power technology and service provider founded in 2007. SkyFuel solar collectors harness solar radiation to produce steam for electricity generation and industrial applications. The Company is emerging as a leading supplier of utility-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) systems. SkyFuel’s market-ready product is an advanced, glass-free parabolic trough solar thermal collector, called the SkyTrough™. It is the highest performance, lowest-cost utility-scale solar power system in the world. SkyFuel is also developing a next-generation solar system, the Linear Power Tower™, a high-temperature linear Fresnel collector designed for thermal energy storage. SkyFuel’s wholly owned subsidiary, ReflecTech, Inc., holds an exclusive license to manufacture, market and sell a high-reflectance silverized-polymer film, called ReflecTech® Mirror Film. This film is for use as a mirror surface, primarily in solar technologies such as the SkyTrough™. ReflecTech® is the only high-reflectance mirror film proven for outdoor applications.
For more information, contact Chris Huntington, VP Business Development, at (917) 715-2253 or Chris.Huntington@SkyFuel.com
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