13 December 2012

Pioneer PV Solutions launch operations to provide high-quality, off-the-shelf, compact solar solutions

Pioneer PV Solutions, a thin-film copper indium gallium (di)selenide (CIGS) microsolar company, has officially launched its operations. The firm will provide high-quality, off-the-shelf, compact solar solutions for rechargeable and DC power applications.

"There is no question that the efficiency, durability, and quality of 'big solar' technologies has vastly improved over the past 20 years," said Vincent Kapur, VP of business development for Pioneer PV. "Yet off-the-shelf 'small solar' solutions are not adequately matched to the needs of the wide variety of microsolar applications. They are often the result of a 'scrapyard legacy,' where castoff crystalline-silicon cells are broken up and manually assembled into suboptimal mini-modules, with little attention paid to quality control, reliability, and performance,” he adds. “The economics of force-feeding the leftovers of traditional big solar technologies into small solar applications doesn't make sense anymore."

One of the largest emerging markets for microsolar-scale panels is lighting in the developing world, where some 1.4bn people have extremely limited or nonexistent access to the electrical grid and in many cases rely on inefficient and polluting kerosene lamps or nothing at all, says the firm. A recent International Finance Corp study on solar off-grid lighting in seven Asian countries identified a potential market of 75m households, which currently spend approximately $2.2bn on kerosene annually, in India alone.

Pioneer PV is engaged with a number of OEM integrators on high-end, low-cost solar charging solutions for their product lines. It continues to pursue additional strategic funding to expand its market development efforts and finance the build-out of a dedicated thin-film microsolar production line.

Tags: CIGS

Visit: www.pioneerpvsolutions.com