World solar photovoltaic (PV) market installations reached a record high of 5.95 gigawatts (GW) in 2008, representing growth of 110% over the previous year. Europe accounted for 82% of world demand in 2008. Spain's 285% growth pushed Germany into second place in the market ranking, while the US advanced to number three. Rapid growth in Korea allowed it to become the fourth largest market, closely followed by Italy and Japan. The PV industry generated $37.1 billion in global revenues in 2008, while successfully raising over $12.5bn in equity and debt, up 11% on the prior year. Worldwide Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) is currently being developed for utility-scale, central power generation markets in the U.S., Spain, North Africa, and Israel. Over 5,800MW of CSP projects are in the pipeline and expect to be online by 2012.
As the PV and CSP markets grow at a rapid pace, there are several areas in both industries that need to be addressed in order for PV and CSP to achieve Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) with conventional fossil fueled forms of energy. For CSP, thermal management and storage, systems integration, and reliability need to be addressed in order to be competitive and provide baseload power generation. For PV it is storage, systems integration, power electronics, innovation cycles, and reliability. Ricardo has worked successfully with industry leaders in transportation and Clean Energy to solve the afore mentioned issues to bring quality, reliable, cost effective products to consumers throughout the world.
Solar Power Engineering
Ricardo solar engineering capabilities cover the following key systems:
• Power Electronics
• Control Systems
• System Modeling and Integration
• Thermal Management
Ricardo Services
With over 20,000 man - years of product development experience in highly competitive industries such as transportation and defence, Ricardo can offer a full range of services to Clean Energy organizations to deliver high quality and reliable products:
• Product Development Planning
• Program Management
• Design Analysis and Prototyping
• Quality Improvement, Cost Reduction and Design for Manufacture
• Supply Chain Management
• Validation and Launch
A Concentrated Solar Power company in North America used Ricardo’s expertise in product development to reduce production costs, improve manufacturing process, and improve system performance. Ricardo applied well-proven product engineering practices in design optimization & material selection, performance modeling and analysis, mechanical dynamic analysis, reliability and robustness engineering, design for manufacture & cost optimization, and supply chain management to meet the clients needs. Ricardo augments clients skill by integrating a Ricardo team with the clients technical team in order to leverage solutions and facilitate technology transfer.
Ricardo identified four areas for cost reduction in the manufacturing process. The client was provided with a number of alternative design and manufacturing solutions along with cost analysis for each solution. Not only were costs reduced by >25% but design robustness was improved.
Ricardo’s unique combination of being able to simultaneously develop innovative ideas, apply highly disciplined engineering techniques, and product development were developed in one of the worlds toughest mass-production technology environments, the transportation sector. These same skill sets can be utilized in the rapidly growing Clean Energy sector where companies and products are evolving from niche markets to mass markets, from utility scale to residential scale, from energy to transportation to buildings.