An Alberta company with technology that converts ‘raw’ renewable energy into highly efficient, grid- connected power has shipped its first manufactured product.

Sustainable Energy Technologies Inc., a publicly traded Calgary firm, has delivered its first commercial power inverters to Nuvera Fuel Cells in Cambridge, Mass.

Advanced power inverters are the critical link in making alternative energy systems, such as solar power, fuel cells and small-scale wind energy, work.

Sustainable Energy’s inverters convert the direct current generated by solar photovoltaic panels, fuel cells and wind turbines into an energy-efficient, reliable alternating current. AC is the electricity used in homes and businesses and carried on utility transmission lines.

Shannon Oatway, Business Edge
Michael Carten, CEO of Calgary-based Sustainable Energy Technologies, is pursuing U.S. solar power markets.

“The approach that we take to power conversion is unique,” says company president and CEO Michael Carten. Carten, a former senior executive with Nesbitt Burns, founded Sustainable Energy Technologies in 1998 to develop Canadian technologies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and could be exported to other countries.

Converting relatively inefficient energy produced by solar radiation, fuel cells and small-scale wind power into useable electricity is one of the renewable energy industry’s biggest challenges. It is also a potential billion-dollar market.

“The new technology generates (the power) in one form, but you need it in a different form for the user,” says Dale Tardiff, a power electronics specialist at Innovative Power Solutions Inc. in Calgary.

Tardiff, a consultant who has done work for Sustainable Energy Technologies, says he’s impressed by the company’s renewable energy inverter. “If they can develop the right alliances and the right marketing, it’s a good technology, especially for use with solar (power).”

The market for renewable energy inverters is projected to grow by 34 per cent a year over the next five years, according to a recent report by Frost & Sullivan, a leading industrial research group. By 2008, the annual North American market for such inverters is expected to be $571 million US.

For several months, Sustainable Energy has been successfully testing a five-kilowatt version of its inverter, connected with a commercial-scale solar panel array at its northwest Calgary offices.

Last month, Natural Resources Canada’s CANMET Technology Centre announced a contribution of up to $100,000 toward commercializing the inverter for solar power applications.

Carten says his company’s initial plan is to go after the grid-connected residential and small business markets for solar power in California and the eastern seaboard in the U.S. However, he notes that the company’s inverter was originally designed for the emerging fuel-cell market. This market is projected to be worth $46 billion in 2011, according to a recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Nuvera Fuel Cells picked the Calgary firm’s inverter for use in its first demonstration unit fuel-cell-powered furnaces, aimed at the residential market in Europe.

RWE Piller GmbH, a large German power supply firm, paid Sustainable Energy $790,000 last year for a non-exclusive licence to use the inverter in fuel-cell applications. RWE Piller plans to manufacture a series of five-kilowatt inverters for a leading North American fuel-cell developer.

Independent tests by the prestigious Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico show Sustainable Energy’s inverter is more than 93-per-cent efficient across a full range of power loads.

That compares with 80- to 85-per-cent efficiency for most inverters on the market, Carten says.

A 10-per-cent improvement in capturing and using solar energy translates into savings of 10 per cent in capital costs, because the solar panel array doesn’t have to be as large. The economics for fuel-cell applications is even more attractive with higher power-conversion efficiencies.

Carten says that the inverter is a relatively simple, durable design that can be easily mass-manufactured for a variety of renewable energy applications. Its high efficiency is attained through patented software that provides fine control of the power flow through the inverter as well as interactions with the utility grid.

Sustainable Energy has partnered with the Calgary operation of Sanmina SCI, a leading contract manufacturer that handles the design integrity and production of the inverter.

By this summer, Carten says, the goal is to have a four- to five-kilowatt, wall-mounted inverter on the market and being sold to one or more of the world’s major solar photovoltaic manufacturers.

With 10 employees and annual earnings of about $248,000 in the last fiscal year (ending Sept. 30, 2002), Sustainable Energy is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange as “STG.”