To Infinia And Beyond  

Erick Schonfeld at TechChrunch has a post on solar energy company Infinia and their Stirling Engine based technology.

If you thought clean energy financings were hot last year, 2008 promises to be scorching. Case in point: Infinia today raised a $50 million series B, led by British hedge fund GLG partners. Existing investors Equus, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gross’ Idealab, and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital also participated in the round (after putting in $9.5 million just last June).

Infinia has developed utility-scale renewable energy technology that combines a Stirling engine with a large solar collector. The Stirling engine, a technology that’s been around since the 19th century, converts the heat into electricity. Infinia used to be called Stirling Cycles, and has been around for more than two decades. It has designed Stirling engines as power sources for NASA missions, implantable artificial hearts, and cooling devices that the army uses in Iraq. Now, it is focussed exclusively on using the technology to create 14-foot diameter solar collectors that can generate 3.5 kilowatts of energy apiece. Gang together 50 or 100 (at about $20,000 a pop) and you have the energy producing capacity of a small power plant.

Infinia’s Stirling engine is powered by a free-moving piston that requires no lubricants, and thus no maintenance. “What makes this unique is the no-maintenance profile,” says chief financial officer, Gregg Clevenger, “the ability to deploy a Stirling engine out in the desert and it is engineered to run for 20 years without you having to do anything.” It is also designed to be assembled with common mass-produced parts that an auto-parts supplier could manufacture. Getting the cost down is the key to creating a technology that is competitive with other forms of energy.

Using its Stirling engine technology, Inifnia thinks it can eventually produce electricity 20 to 30 percent cheaper than today’s existing solar panels. And in times of peak energy demand—on a hot summer day, for instance—it could even be competitive with electricity from gas-powered or coal-fired plants.

When it comes to providing solar system technology on mass scale, Infinia is far from alone.

Companies like Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ausra, also are in the race. In December, Ausra said it was building the world's largest factory for solar-thermal power systems in Las Vegas (see Ausra to Build World's Largest Solar-Thermal Factory).

Unlike Infinia, Ausra's technology uses fields of mirrors to heat water into steam, which is then converted into electricity using a standard steam turbine.

And others have turned to a type of concentrating solar that takes sunlight from a larger area and uses lenses or glass to direct and concentrate it onto smaller solar cells.

In January, Mountain View, Calif.-based SolFocus installed its first array of solar cells in what will be a 3-megawatt project in Spain. And Germany's Concentrix Solar installed 12 of its solar-tracking systems for a Spanish project, according to Gunther Portfolio.

But despite the slew of companies gunning to deliver concentrating solar technologies, few have been able to deliver the goods on a large scale and at an economical price.

Among the challenges concentrating solar faces are issues of durability because it has more parts than traditional solar systems. For example, Clevenger said each Stirling solar system unit is comprised of several hundred parts.

Infinia plans on contracting with manufacturers around the world to make the individual parts and assemble them in U.S.-based facilities.

But is Infinia's piston-driving approach just one more moving part to worry about? Clevenger said no. "We have developed this engine to be zero maintenance," he said explaining the encapsulating cylinder won't ever have to be opened for such things like adding more lubricant of which there is none.

One of the biggest obstacles to full-scale rollout of alternative energy sources—beyond the fact that they cost more than traditional power sources—is getting the things built. Solar power’s development has been hampered in part by a lack of super-pure silicon. The wind power industry is just shaking off supply-chain bottlenecks that have crimped production.

One solar upstart hopes to sidestep production problems—before it even starts producing.

Infinia Corp., based in Kennewick, Wash., which makes a concentrated solar-power device, today landed $50 million in Series B financing that the company says will pave the way for commercial-scale production of the as-yet unproven solar thermal technology. ...

A big part of the cash will be used to help re-tool Infinia’s prospective component suppliers in the automotive parts industry, says chief executive J. D. Sitton. Infinia’s devices combine a small engine with a concentrating dish that directs sunlight onto the motor, which converts it into electricity more efficiently than regular photovoltaic solar panels. Its 250-odd components were purposely designed, Mr. Sitton says, so that auto parts manufacturers could use their space capacity to produce them. ...

Infinia hopes to start production in November this year and within a few years reach annual production of about 200 megawatts—that is, a few hundred thousand of the 3.5 kilowatt devices—with an eye to selling to utilities.