From the Plenty blog, Cutting Edge:
Sunrgi, a Hollywood-based start-up, came out of stealth mode this week claiming it can collect twice as much sunlight as other photovoltaic designs and convert it to electricity for 5 cents a kilowatt-hour, on par with fossil fuels.
The company’s core technology is concentrating solar power, which uses lenses to focus sunlight onto small strips of photovoltaic cells. The advantage is that more photons are collected by smaller quantities of solar cells, meaning that the systems require much less of the expensive semiconductor materials that go into making ordinary solar panels. But the cells are also fragile and easily damaged in extreme heat, as I wrote about here.
Sunrgi’s solution involves “goop–or at least that’s what GreenTechMedia quotes Paul Sidlo, a co-founder and partner at Sunrgi, as saying. It sounds like a nanotech slurry that’s mounted on the back of a fairly ordinary solar cell to conduct heat away from the cell.