Solar Energy

CCI is working with governments in Australia, India, South Africa, and the United States to create the first "solar parks" areas where solar power is produced on a large scale and at reduced cost.

Solar energy has strong potential to become a significant global energy source, but its development faces barriers today. In the absence of carbon regulations and targeted financial solutions, the cost of energy generation from solar is currently more expensive than the cost of energy generation from traditional sources (for example, coal and natural gas). The technology is therefore underfinanced while deployment is slow and fragmented only a small portion of the technologys potential is currently being realized. While the market for solar energy eventually will come online, through targeted interventions we can overcome short-term barriers and accelerate this process considerably.

Our Approach
CCIs projects demonstrate the technology and stimulate government investment and incentives to drive down the cost of the technology. We work in three principal ways: cost analysis, relationship building, and strategic planning and assessment.

Cost Analysis
CCI gives government partners the information and insight necessary to plan and implement solar projects and related policies more effectively. Both independent and agnostic to the different types of photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar power (CSP) technology, CCI has relationships with key leading technology developers, and through these relationships has obtained unprecedented access to proprietary cost and performance information.

CCI has used this information to develop a highly sophisticated financial model that projects the costs of solar electricity for each type of PV and CSP technology, at various scales, and in various geographies, and evaluates the technologys key cost-drivers. While maintaining the confidentiality of individual companies, we share detailed analysis with governments to help them understand the range of power costs under different deployment scenarios and evaluate options for public incentives and project development. We also share our deep understanding of the various financing structures available for solar projects from both the public and private sectors.

Relationship Building
Formal networks within the solar energy industry are limited and fragmented. Between the public and private domain, across international boundaries, and even between industry players themselves, communication is limited. As a result, governments that have a strong interest in solar programs often have limited and inconsistent information regarding the costs and performance of the various solar technologies. From program creation through project execution, CCI convenes stakeholders, including technology developers,

material and component manufacturers, financial investors, and government officials, forging partnerships in the context of developing projects on scale that has never been previously attempted.

Strategic Planning and Assessment

A key part of our work is to advise governments on the policies and incentives necessary to stimulate the solar market and adopt our solar park model. We also prepare in-depth feasibility studies and assist in developing the plan to execute. Our research, analysis, and business modelling assess the technology and financing options, their related costs at different scales, and potential sites and transmission requirements.

Solar Energy Technologies

There are two main types of solar technology:

Photovoltaics (PV) use panels typically made of variations of semiconductor material, which capture and convert sunlight directly into electricity. A new variation of PV technology, called CVP, enhances the amount of sunlight directed onto a unit area of the semiconductor material by using a series of mirrors and lenses.

Concentrating solar power (CSP) technology, also known as "solar thermal," uses mirrors and/or lenses to concentrate sunlight, using the heat to generate electricity through conventional steam turbines or engines. Both PV and CSP emit no carbon and can supply a meaningful portion of electricity demand in countries with high levels of sunlight. Many solar technologies can be combined with various forms of storage facilities (for example, thermal storage in molten salt tanks) to provide a predictable, secure, and flexible energy source. By "oversizing" plants to exceed daytime electricity demand, companies can store the excess output and deploy the electricity around-the-clock or on an as-needed basis. Solar energy can be built readily on a large scale. For PV, there is significant and growing manufacturing capacity, with substantial potential for additional manufacturing capacity growth. For CSP, the various methods of capturing the suns heat are not particularly complex, nor difficult to maintain. The steam turbines and engines used to produce electricity are similar to those of a coal plant, and therefore are commercially available and present few uncertainties. Even so, successful plants require careful site selection, often with incremental transmission and other infrastructure investment required.

Solar Parks
Our approach centers on a model for solar parks in which multiple companies build optimally scaled solar plants on adjacent parcels of land. Because a solar plant incurs most of its lifecycle costs during construction, this approach lowers capital and construction costs by:

Combining purchasing power for raw materials, components, and construction/engineering services Allocating infrastructure costs and risks across a larger asset base Accelerating government permitting processes and shortening development time

In this context, we help governments evaluate costs and establish a turnkey set of incentives, permitting and financing mechanisms that create a stable and predictable investment environment. Governments with solar development efforts already underway still can adopt this model, either incorporating existing projects into the solar park, or simply granting these projects the same incentives.