SBIR-STTR Award

Poultry growing consumes a a great deal of energy and electricity and fuel (propane) costs are a significant part of farmers' growing costs. Current solar photovoltaic power systems seem like they could reduce the industry's costs however because of their technical limits they cannot. Sun Edge proposes novel optics for separating sunlight into its component wavelengths allowing for precise spectrum matching of light to multiple photovolatic materials. This allows overcoming the energy efficiency limitations on typical single-junction photovoltaic power systems and dramatically reduces the cost of higher-efficiency multi-junction photovoltaic systems. These changes will permit solar power to reduce the poultry growing industry's electricity/fuel costs and Americans' energy costs in general Sun Edge proposes to optimize the company's proprietary state of the art optics design and incorporate into a prototype photovoltaic module with multiple photovoltaic junctions. The goal is to demonstrate concept feasibility in terms of both total cost and in energy efficiency.