SUN EDGE, LLC — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.3

Description

Poultry growing consumes a a great deal of energy and electricity and fuel (propane) costs are asignificant part of farmers' growing costs.Current solar photovoltaic power systems seem like theycould reduce the industry's costs however because of their technical limits they can not.Sun Edge proposes novel optics for separating sunlight into its component wavelengths allowingfor precise spectrum matching of light to multiple photovolatic materials.This allows overcomingthe energy efficiency limitations on typical single-junction photovoltaic power systems anddramatically reduces the cost of higher-efficiency multi-junction photovoltaic systems.Thesechanges will permit solar power to reduce the poultry growing industry's electricity/fuel costs andAmericans' energy costs in generalSun Edge proposes to optimize the company's proprietary state of the art optics design andincorporate into a prototype photovoltaic module with multiple photovoltaic junctions. The goal isto demonstrate concept feasibility in terms of both total cost and in energy efficiency.