Thin-film company Pioneer PV Solutions, today officially opened its doors for business.
The company said it plans to provide “off-the-shelf”, compact solar solutions for rechargeable and DC power applications to “a multi-billion dollar market segment suffering from an inconsistent solar product supply chain”.
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In a statement issued today, Pioneer PV said that, despite significant advancements in solar power technology and the growth of the large-scale power module market, the opposite end of the spectrum has not benefited much from the increased quality and performance.
Pioneer PV argued that today’s leading photovoltaic module manufacturers focus on the residential, commercial and utility power segments, with little or no attention paid to the needs and requirements of low-power applications requiring up to 40 watts.
“There is no question that the efficiency, durability, and quality of ‘big solar’ technologies has vastly improved over the past 20 years,” explains Vincent Kapur, vice president of business development for Pioneer PV.
“Yet off-the-shelf ‘small solar’ solutions are not adequately matched to the needs of the wide variety of microsolar applications.”
Pioneer PV said the range of applications that can employ microsolar-scale panels represents a vast “mega-niche”, from mobile consumer electronics to parking meters, remote industrial sensors to rural water filtration and purification systems.
One of the largest emerging markets is lighting in the developing world, where some 1.4 billion people have extremely limited or nonexistent access to the electrical grid and in many cases rely on inefficient and polluting kerosene lamps—or nothing at all.
