"Anything requiring tracking is not going to be competitive with regular solar cells for simple mathematical reasons so I suspect this is not quite as breakthrough as the title makes it seem."
I see one thing which even 5 hours after your post no one has observed, which is that while your argument may make sense for two otherwise-equal non-concentrating solar panels, for a concentrating solar panel based on small cells you don't have a non-tracking option to compare against. If your concentrator isn't tracking, then the vast majority of the time it's concentrating on not-the-solar-cell, which isn't useful. You'll never be able to mount this on your roof flush with your shingles.
If they can make small, 40-50% efficient cells, then the tracking setup may very well beat a conventional lucky-to-be-20% efficient setup regardless of how it tracks. The additional money the setup is making over a conventional cell (literally) buys you some maintenance options that are harder to justify for a solar cell that starts out more expensive than natural gas.
I've got my own questions about their claimed efficiency, but the good news is that solar efficiency is pretty easy to directly measure, so I can just sit back and wait for their customers to work out what's going on. If they're right, they're right.
No, that does not make any difference. You're tracking the same area, it's based on incident light, not on the resulting surface area of the detector.
See the image with the article, it's a giant square leaf doing 2 axis tracking. So the concentrator and the cells are on the same substrate.
I did try exactly what you are suggesting (to separate the tracked panels and the concentrator) but then you run into a totally different set of problems.
I'm not sure you got my point. There is no non-tracking concentrated high-quality solar cell option to compare against. You can only compare "tracking conventional" to "non-tracking conventional" to "tracking concentrating high-quality", and if they really get higher conversion ratios the latter can't be collapsed into the former without loss.
Let me try to rephrase what I was trying to put across.
Solar power output is a function of the total incident power (~ 1KW/sq meter on a clear day), reflection losses, heat losses, conversion losses and resistive losses. In the case of a concentrator you will also have losses due to imperfect optics (square lenses with a small area collector behind them in this case) and alignment.
As you correctly observe, you can compare tracking conventional to non-tracking conventional.
But in this case you can also compare tracking conventional with tracking non-conventional. The only variable is how you gather the light on the cell in that case, we already know how to track conventional cells.
So if the concentration step makes up for the losses in the optics and the reduced lifespan of the cell (more suns / area -> shorter lifespan!) then they may be in the money.
But with a lens system alignment has to be just about perfect (most tracking systems have a few degrees of error, no problem but for a concentrator with such a high degree of concentration a degree or more might put the spot next to the collector), which means they're going to have to have a very precise drive system on that huge leaf, and it will have to be extremely rigidly constructed so wind pressure on the leaf does not push it off from the ideal angle.
All these are engineering issues that they may have solved but the article does not mention any of that.
If their concentrating trick beats that 44% at 90 degrees to the sun they have a record on their hands, but that does not yet make it a feasible tech, for that it has to be cost effective too.
The collector has to be mass produced cheaply enough and the tracker system can't add too much overhead in cost, disadvantages in shading will have to be overcome by corresponding increases in efficiency.
If all those conditions are met then they're possibly going to end up producing power cheaper than conventional, rigidly mounted cells at ~24% efficiency.
Solar is rapidly headed for a 'piston engine' situation, where conventional cells can be produced so cheaply that better technology will have to overcome a huge advantage in invested $ and economies of scale before it will be considered.
From that point of view I don't think this tech stands much of a chance, it will have to be built to very exact degrees of tolerance, it causes losses because of the tracking (less usable area with a tracked system), it is more expensive to mount and maintain than an untracked system and it still needs to recoup the start-up losses.
That's a large amount of disadvantage to overcome. I've sunk a good bit of money into a tracking system that had some fairly unique properties (the tracking system was relatively rigidly mounted and the collector was stationary, still converted solar to electricity directly) and I think I have a basic grasp of the economies of solar installations. I wish this company the very best and I hope they will make it but I fear that the degree of complexity, the increase in cost per area covered and the reliability of tracked systems in general and this one in particular will not make it competitive.
I see one thing which even 5 hours after your post no one has observed, which is that while your argument may make sense for two otherwise-equal non-concentrating solar panels, for a concentrating solar panel based on small cells you don't have a non-tracking option to compare against. If your concentrator isn't tracking, then the vast majority of the time it's concentrating on not-the-solar-cell, which isn't useful. You'll never be able to mount this on your roof flush with your shingles.
If they can make small, 40-50% efficient cells, then the tracking setup may very well beat a conventional lucky-to-be-20% efficient setup regardless of how it tracks. The additional money the setup is making over a conventional cell (literally) buys you some maintenance options that are harder to justify for a solar cell that starts out more expensive than natural gas.
I've got my own questions about their claimed efficiency, but the good news is that solar efficiency is pretty easy to directly measure, so I can just sit back and wait for their customers to work out what's going on. If they're right, they're right.