GreenVolts receives $30M funding

San Francisco-based GreenVolts said today it has closed $30 million in B-round financing, which will help finance its large solar utility plant and provide growth capital for the company.

“This investment will be used to fund a portion of the construction of GV1 as well as our long-term needs for building the company,” Bob Cart, founder and CEO of GreenVolts told the Cleantech Group. “That includes staffing and key new hires, advancing the technology through R&D and providing general working capital.”

GreenVolts said its non-silicon concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) power plant is being built as part of an agreement with Pacific Gas & Electric. The company said it expects the 2-megawatt GV1 plant in Tracy, Calif., to be operational later this year (see GreenVolts lands agreement with PG&E).

GreenVolts said the R&D investment will be put toward efforts aimed to lowering its “levelized” cost against competing photovoltaic technologies. The company said it expects to gain market advantages from improving the overall cost, which is expected to accelerate adoption of CPV for companies

Levelized cost of energy is a metric used to compare any of several different approaches for producing energy. Simply put, it is the total cost of generating energy, divided by the amount of energy produced.

Today, GreenVolts said its technology and systems produce energy for the wholesale market (see GreenVolts entering trial with northwest utility). That means the technology competes directly with electrical energy generated by burning fossil fuels, such as natural gas. The company said its overall market strategy is to expand its efforts to sell equipment and technology to large commercial and industrial customers.

Cart said GreenVolts is currently finalizing deals with several  customers but declined to name the companies.

The company calls its 3-kilowatt platform a CarouSol. It uses low cost mirrors to concentrate 625 suns of energy onto a small, 40 percent-efficient solar cell, according to third-party tests. CPV also has advantages for efficiency gains over other types of solar because CPV lends itself to the rapid adoption of new improvements in cell efficiency as well as new cell technologies.

The company said its efficiency is accomplished through the company’s integration of optics and solar tracking technologies. Typical silicon solar cells are able to convert sunlight into energy with a 13 percent to 18 percent efficiency ratio.

In terms of the near term goals, GreenVolts is focusing its resources on completing its large scale GV1 project.

“Our focus for the remainder of this year is deploying the first phase of GV1—a project that will be the largest deployment of non-silicon CPV in the world,” Cart said.