Australian company Green and Gold Energy has put a solar appliance called a Sun Cube on the market. The Sun Cube is an interesting and simple concept. It’s effectively a box with Fresnel lenses on one side and triple junction solar cells on the other. The appliance is mounted on a dual axis tracking system to ensure that the assembly is always pointed at the optimal location to absorb and focus sunlight onto the cells and the whole deal is controlled with an on-board microprocessor.

Here’s a picture of the appliance:


Recently GGE has announced that they’ve been able to get 35.4% efficiency from these units, see the graph below for data on the experiment. Update: May 14, 2007: the efficiency graph has been removed from Sun Cube’s web site, thus we are unsure if this claim still stands. We have contacted Green and Gold Energy directly and asked them to comment on this entry and contribute any material they see fit to assist in clarification.

Update to the Update: May 15, 2007: Greg Watson, CEO of Green and Gold Energy responded immediately to our inquiry. In a nutshell, G&G have changed business strategy from distributed solar installations to concentrated solar installations with utilities. This change was prompted in part as a means to better manage their intellectual property. Mr. Watson says he knows the change in strategy has caused some grief among early adopters, but this is the direction the company needs to pursue.


This could be a good option for home installations, we’ll watch GGE and the SunCube with interest.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 8:30 am and is filed under Solar.