News

GreenVolts Secures $10 Million Series A Financing

November 04, 2007 by Jeff Shepard

GreenVolts announced that it has secured $10 million in Series A funding. The company also announced that its CarouSol™ tracking system has begun producing energy at Avista’s Clean Energy Test Site, and that it is on track for deployment of its GV1 plant in late 2008.

GreenVolts concentrated solar technology targets industrial or utility-scale distributed generation applications. The company’s technology maximizes energy yield from high efficiency solar cells, resulting in high energy density. The company claims that, compared to conventional solar panels, its solution requires less land while producing twice the energy at half the cost. The GreenVolts system does not require large remote tracts of land and associated investments in new transmission lines.

Earlier this year, GreenVolts was chosen by Pacific Gas & Electric Company to build GV1, a 2MW facility that the company claims will be the largest concentrating photovoltaic plant in the world when completed. The company is on track to deliver the first phase of this facility in late 2008.

GreenVolts’ Series A round of funding was led by Greenlight Energy Resources, an operator of renewable energy projects and an investor in early stage renewable energy companies, and included Avista Corp. and several other investors.

GreenVolts believes that utility-scale distributed generation is the key to a future for clean, renewable energy. The company claims that the CarouSol tracking system concentrates 625 times the sun onto its solar cells, producing what is described as breakthrough efficiency using less land and half the capital investment of competitive technologies. The design of this system is also said to allows it to be plugged into the grid nearer to the demand than any other technology, delivering up to 20MW of solar energy where it is needed most.