Joakim Byström is an entrepreneur who built his first solar concentrator at the age of 12. “We Swedes love the sun,” he says.  “And whenever it’s shining, we really try to get the most out of it.”

Joakim Byström has made the power of the sun his business. Photo: Kristofer Lönnå/Absolicon

Byström is one of a small but dedicated group of Swedish entrepreneurs and inventors behind groundbreaking technologies that they hope will help solar power reach its huge potential; today solar only accounts for about 0.02 percent of the world’s energy supply.

“Solar technology will save the world,” Byström says, “and we are quite convinced that concentrated solar energy is an important part of the solution to the world’s energy problems.”

While at university, Byström participated in UN environmental negotiations like the Kyoto climate conference. But as his frequent flyer miles piled up, he started to question what he was doing. “I was traveling all over the world to change a sentence here and there in a document,” he says. “It didn't do too much for the climate.”

Solar power for electricity and heat

So, together with some like-minded colleagues, Byström set out to develop his childhood ideas of harnessing and concentrating the power of the sun. The result was Absolicon, a company based in Härnösand on Sweden’s east coast, of which Byström is managing director. Its product, the X10, is the world’s first commercial solar concentrator that produces heat and electricity simultaneously.

“We use a silver reflector to focus rays from the sun onto small solar cells, and those cells produce electricity,” Byström says. “But they also get very hot, so we extract electricity and we use the heat to heat up water.” Twenty percent of the thermal energy goes to generating electricity, and 80 percent goes to hot water.

 
Details of Absolicon's solar technology: Solar Heat and Solar Electricity. Photo: Doreen Bernhard/Absolicon

Absolicon’s solar collectors have a number of advantages over other solar technologies, such as their ability to track the sun, which means they generate more energy and are ideal for use in northerly or southerly latitudes. Their environmental impact is also greatly reduced.

“The silicon that is used in traditional photovoltaic panels is very energy-consuming to produce, but we only need one-tenth of the amount of silicon to produce the same amount of electricity,” Byström says. “And the copper that is used in normal solar thermal collectors has a large ecological footprint, while our design is basically iron and glass, and that's it.”

Efficient solar energy conversion

Meanwhile, in Malmö in southern Sweden, Ripasso Energy is behind a groundbreaking solar technology that uses the sun’s rays to power an engine, which is then used to generate electricity.

A mirror concentrates the sun’s rays to create heat, which causes expansion of hydrogen gas. This gas drives the pistons of a Stirling engine, a contraption invented by a Scottish priest in the early 1800s and then further developed by Swedish submarine manufacturer Kockums. The result is the most efficient conversion of solar energy to electrical power that is currently available.

Ripasso's solar technology includes the use of a mirror to concentrate the sun's rays. Photo: Ripasso Energy 

Sales director Tore Svensson confirms this. “There is nothing in operation which is as land-efficient as our technology.” By comparison, he says that China’s Three Gorges Dam — the world's largest electricity-generating plant — requires roughly 1,000 times more land area than Ripasso’s technology does to generate the same energy.

Besides the advantages of the product itself, Ripasso Energy’s Stirling Power Converters have something else going for them that often proves problematic for new environmental technologies: the potential for mass production. The product will be manufactured at a state-of-the-art assembly line that also produces gearboxes for truck-maker Scania.

“This plant could produce up to 100,000 units per year — which means 3 gigawatts of electricity, or the equivalent of the output of roughly five nuclear power plants per year,” Svensson says.

To date Ripasso Energy has kept a low profile, but word is spreading about the technology. Customers — mainly large utility companies — are now lining up. “My main problem at the moment is keeping them away,” Svensson says. “There are many players who have said they will wait for us, because at the moment we are testing and refining and ensuring that we can manufacture in large volumes. The serial production is planned to start late 2011 or early 2012.”

Solar-powered cooling system

In the Swedish capital of Stockholm, ClimateWell is causing a similar stir with its revolutionary technology for solar-powered air conditioning. At the heart of the process is hot water, heated by the sun.

An illustration of how ClimateWell's Solar Cooling® system works. Photo: ClimateWell

Sales director Johan Larsson explains: “In short, we provide cold water and we charge the unit by using hot water,” Larsson says. “We store solar energy in a chemical way without losses over time. This also allows us to deliver cooling during the night, even though there is no sun.”

ClimateWell has won a long list of awards for its technology, including the prestigious Technology Pioneer Award presented by the World Economic Forum, while leading newspapers The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal have both listed ClimateWell among their top clean technology, or cleantech, companies.

Founded in 2001, ClimateWell has a purpose-built factory in Spain and sales partners from the United Arab Emirates to Chile to Australia.

“Solar cooling sounds contradictory, and that is the beauty of it, because it attracts people’s attention,” Larsson says.

Bright Swedish research

According to Tomas Kåberger, director-general of the Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten), solar energy is often dismissed in Sweden simply because there is more sunshine elsewhere. “But all the time there are new solar technology researchers and companies appearing that have successful ideas in the field,” he says.

“Maybe the reason is that in Sweden we see the need for solar energy and like to take on a challenge. Bright ideas may be more important than bright sunlight when developing solar technologies for the world.”

David Wiles

David Wiles is a British journalist living in Sweden. He hopes to use solar power to charge his own batteries this winter by heading somewhere warm for a week or two.