Sun King returns to take on solar farms with lightweight 'skins'
Australian solar energy entrepreneur Zhengrong Shi has known dark days.
His first company, Suntech Power, listed on the New York stock exchange, hit a market cap of $US16 billion, and became, in 2011, the world’s largest producer of solar panels. Two years later, it filed for bankruptcy.
Now the “Sun King” is back with his second company, SunMan Co, and its breakthrough product: eArche, a solar panel that is 70 per cent lighter than its traditional counterparts.
Speaking before the launch of installations on the Australian National Maritime Museum’s rooftop, Dr Shi said solar panels had been around for 40 years but had not evolved beyond “blue, rectangular glass”.
This posed a barrier to uptake for commercial properties, as many as 70 per cent of which had “slender roofs” that cannot sustain the weight of existing solar installations.
SunMan’s innovation was to dispense with glass altogether, and make its panels from a lightweight polymer composite material. It took five years to bring the technology to market, and to secure accreditation from the Clean Energy Council.
The company’s immediate strategy is to retrofit existing buildings that presently cannot support solar installations. “This is one low-hanging fruit market for the company to grow for the time being,” Dr Shi said.
But SunMan’s ultimate ambitions are bigger. Dr Shi described his lightweight panels as a kind of “skin” encasing the exterior of a building and said it could eventually be integrated into the construction material itself.
If successful, the technology would expand access to “behind the meter” energy systems, which use power at the site of its generation, and reduce reliance on the grid.
Monthly solar installations across Australia within the typical range for commercial properties
While large-scale solar farms have battled connection issues and building delays for the past year, the uptake of solar panels in the commercial property sector has increased unabated. Most of these installations fall between 9.5 and 100 kilowatts in size.
Australian Photovoltaic Institute chair Renate Egan attributed this trend to a feature of “behind the meter” systems. They made for a “much more cost-competitive product” by taking out the expense of distribution, she said.
Suntech Power collapsed amid a drastic fall in solar panel prices and difficulties sourcing raw materials to sustain its production levels.
Reflecting on the company’s demise, Dr Shi said Suntech had been a pioneer in an infant industry and he had since learnt to “maybe grow slower a little bit, and try not to do a lot of things”.
“I keep telling people, ‘I saw everything’ … I see over, as a person, success or failure, or whatever. I see over [these things],” he said.
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