Your average solar power system takes up a lot of space, costs a lot of money and takes days to install. But a Bethlehem company is working on fixing that.
CEWA Technologies has designed a new kind of point-concentrated solar power dish — in layman’s terms, a solar power collector that will focus the sun’s rays on a certain spot, heating up fluid and creating energy. In several important ways, this system will differ from increasingly common photovoltaic arrays, says J. Paul Eisenhuth, CEWA’s president and CEO.
CEWA’s dishes would be small enough to fit on a roof or even hillsides that aren’t conducive to standard solar power systems. They would have aluminum coatings that aren’t as good as what solar energy systems are using now, but are replaceable and cheaper. The dishes would be able to generate more than 30 kilowatts each. An existing system generating one or two kilowatts takes a day or two to install.
CEWA’s next step is building a prototype of its new dish, which it plans to install at Northampton Community College. That’s expected to take six months. Within a year or two, the company hopes to put the product on the market.
The firm plans to market the dishes in the U.S. as well as developing nations like India and China.
“We wanted to come up with something that is very easy to install, very easy to maintain,” Eisenhuth says. “Energy is the key to building any economy, and China and India are emerging economies. They have a voracious appetite for energy.”
Source: J. Paul Eisenhuth, CEWA Technologies
Writer: Rebecca VanderMeulen