Holographic Passively-Tracking Planar Solar Concentrator

Concentrating Solar (CS) technologies intend to overcome the prohibitive price/performance of solar energy by focusing sunlight down to small, manageable areas. However, tracking the suns movement across the sky mandates the use of expensive, large, pivoting structures to effectively capture all angles of the suns path. Unfortunately, this necessity greatly hinders the employment of CS technologies for Distributed Applications (i.e. residential and commercial installations, as opposed to utility-scale), and further, limits the markets to excessively sunny geographical regions (where distributed application consumers generally do not live). In this application, the authors propose a novel solar concentration method which improves the price/performance of standard solar technologies by many multiples (~15x) by collecting the full solar spectrum at all angles of the suns path without any moving parts (Passive Tracking). The technology leverages existing materials and processes to form an inexpensive, compact planar solar collector capable of high concentration for a wide range of Commercial and Residential distributed applications at a fraction of the cost of existing technologies.Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: The proposed innovation will provide a boost to the cost-effectiveness of all other solar technologies (e.g. - PV, solar thermal, heat & amp; power cogeneration, direct solar fiber lighting, etc.), and a diverse range of distributed applications, including residential and industrial installations. The advent of this Passive Tracking provides enormous benefit in that it overcomes the two greatest weaknesses of concentrating solar (CS) for distributed applications: (1) eliminating moving parts which are the cause of the greatest expense/reliability issues of CS, and (2) opening-up CS to cloudy geographic regions.