Bloomfield, Conn. – Turnstone Capital Management,  based in Rowayton, Connecticut and New York City will lead a group that will invest  $4.7 million in Toronto based solar energy start-up, Morgan Solar Inc. Morgan has developed a breakthrough Concentrated Solar Photovoltaic (CPV) panel called the Sun Simba HCPV, a high efficiency, low cost solar technology designed for utility scale and large distributed generation applications. Morgan Solar has spent the last two years designing, testing and refining a technology that is poised to make a major impact in the solar energy industry. The investment group also includes world energy leader Iberdrola Group SA. Iberdrola owns EnergyEast which owns Connecticut based Southern CT Gas/CT Natural Gas.

The syndicate led by Turnstone Capital Management LLC and including Inversiones Financieras Perseo SL, the venture initiative of Iberdrola Group and New Ventures Group LLC the venture investment subsidiary of Nypro Inc will fund Morgan Solar’s migration from research and development to manufacturing. The first tranche of this first investment round is now closed and an additional investment tranche will close soon.

John Paul Morgan, Chief Technology Officer at Morgan Solar and inventor of the proprietary optics technology, acknowledges the investment’s significance, “Iberdrola Group is the biggest possible industry partner we could have, and Nypro are global experts in the manufacturing processes we use. That these companies got in early with us makes me realize how big this could be.”

Iberdrola Group, the largest electrical utility in Spain, one of the five largest electrical utilities in the world and the world’s largest investor in renewable energy has taken an early stake in the company by investing $2.5 million. Pedro Velasco, Director of Non-Energy Businesses at Iberdrola Group said, “Iberdrola’s venture initiative, Inversiones Financieras Perseo SL, is specifically dedicated to investing in early stage, paradigm changing renewable energy technologies that appear to have a very high success potential. We have reviewed hundreds of investment opportunities over the last few years and only invested in Morgan Solar and four others. Their CPV technology is revolutionary, highly efficient and simple to manufacture at very low costs. We see a winner in the making and we took a position as soon as we saw it.”

Morgan Solar is now putting together a pilot manufacturing facility to build the Sun Simba HCPV. Their plan is to deploy demonstration and evaluation installations soon, while fine tuning the manufacturing processes and moving toward commercial release in late 2010.

Source:  Morgan Solar, Inc.

Filed under: CT Green News