While working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for Doctors Without Borders, John Paul Morgan couldn’t ignore the effect the daily toil that hauling water and milling flour had on the bodies of the people he was helping.
So he decided to do something about it. He set up a system to bring clean, running water to the hospital by installing two large solar modules to replace the daily work of 20 full-time water haulers. Since then, the physicist/engineer has dedicated himself to building a better, cheaper solar panel.
“If there’s a way to make electricity affordable enough that those people in that village could afford it and use it and be empowered by it, and have lights to read by and mills to mill their flour with and pumps to move their water, the world would be a better place,” he says.
Along with his brother Nick he started Morgan Solar in 2007.
Unfortunately for the brothers, the solar module business has since changed drastically as the price of solar photovoltaics (PV) has dropped from $4.50 a watt $0.70 a watt, but Nick and his team at Morgan Solar are unperturbed.
But while convinced they had come up with something really, really special, Nick says, “every now and then you stop and think “What if we’re just drinking the Kool-Aid? What if this is just crazy?”
“Then you sit down with totally independent technical people who’ve been hired to just give an independent technical assessment, and they get really excited about it too, that’s when you start to think: ‘Okay, maybe we really are onto something.’”
That something is the development of a concentrated solar photovoltaic module which, unlike a typical solar module which uses a solid panel of silicon, instead uses a device to focus the light onto a tiny, ultra-efficient photovoltaic cell, which is also used to power satellites. It should be ready for market by the summer of 2014.
While there are other concentrated solar PV companies and products out there, the secret sauce for Morgan is in their optics. To gather and focus the light the company use a lens made of cheap, everyday plastic called PMMA. The cheapness of this raw material is the foundation of their plan to disrupt the solar PV industry.
The company has raised $40 million over the last six years from friends and family, angels, government grants, venture capital funds and even Enbridge.
Tom Rand, a director with Morgan Solar, said he had no problem finding investors.
“It wasn’t a problem finding interest, I just reached into my network and within days it was filled up,” he said.
“End of the day, they will be in the market in 2014 with the cheapest solar power on the planet. That’s a game changer.”
Bringing the cost of solar energy down to $0.35 per watt would be quite an achievement. For now, Morgan Solar has a solar tracking system available. Mount any kind of solar PV module into it and it will follow the sun and increase the module’s efficiency.
Morgan Solar is signing its first purchase orders for its concentrating solar modules now for projects in Ontario, the U.S. and India.
And if everything breaks right, it will mean even less backbreaking work hauling water and milling flour for Morgan’s old friends back in the Congo.
Article courtesy of www.greenenergyfutures.ca.
