Touwsrivier CPV Solar Project
Touwsrivier CPV Solar Project is a 44 MWp (36 MWAC) concentrator photovoltaics (CPV) power station located 13 km outside the town of Touwsrivier in the Western Cape of South Africa. The installation reached full capacity in December 2014 and is the second largest operating CPV facility in the world. Electricity produced by the plant is fed into the national grid operated by Eskom under a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA).
Overall layout of the project
Concentrator photovoltaics
Concentrator photovoltaics (CPV) is a photovoltaic technology that generates electricity from sunlight. Unlike conventional photovoltaic systems, it uses lenses or curved mirrors to focus sunlight onto small, highly efficient, multi-junction (MJ) solar cells. In addition, CPV systems often use solar trackers and sometimes a cooling system to further increase their efficiency.
This Amonix system in Las Vegas, US, consists of thousands of small Fresnel lenses, each focusing sunlight to ~500X higher intensity onto a tiny, high-efficiency multi-junction solar cell. A Tesla Roadster is parked beneath for scale.
Concentrator photovoltaics (CPV) modules on dual axis solar trackers in Golmud, China
An example of a Low Concentration PV Cell's surface, showing the glass lensing
A 10×10 mm HCPV solar cell
