CPV Reliability

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, is voting on the first international CPV draft standard suitable for testing all of the CPV geometries and technologies. The IEC standard builds on the concept of 

The California market incentives helped wind and CSP developers and investors move their technologies forward, reducing cost and acquiring valuable operational experience that improved reliability. Wind engineers developed their qualifications standards during this same period like early PV technologies, wind systems often suffered from poor reliability until their certification standards were established and required in the marketplace. 

Some noteworthy similarities exist between wind energy systems and CPV systems.9 They both employ relatively common materials, particularly steel. Wind system costs are typically less than 1 per watt they depend mainly on the cost of steel, whereas flat-plate PV is linked to the availability and cost of expensive semiconductor silicon. But solar concentrator structures are also amenable to an auto-assembly type of production (see Fig. 5), and CPV developers estimate CPV production facility costs are much closer to those of wind systems than to those of flat-plate PV production facihties. In early EPRI cost studies, CPV production facility costs were estimated (on the same costing basis as the crystalline and amorphous silicon facihties) to be about 28 million for a 100 MW per year installation—about one-quarter the cost of the conventional sihcon PV facihties.10 These lower investment costs can lead to a faster scale-up of manufacturing facihties because investor risk is relatively smaller than the risks entailed in investing in conventional PV production facihties. 

Further, cost studies in Spain and Israel estimate CPV installed system costs will, like wind systems costs, finish below 1 per watt when gigawatt levels of CPV production are reached.7 12 Both CPV and wind energy technologies are modular, like flat-plate PV modules, but the sizes are different. Wind units are now megawatts in size whereas CPV units range from kilowatts to tens of kilowatts. Flat-plate PV 

---