Solar Innovater Infinia Company Gets Additional Funding

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclestiastes 1:9 True words, when you look at the combination of a nearly two hundred year-old technology with space age materials for turning sunlight into electricity. That is what Infinia Solar Systems has accomplished with its forty year research and development program using Stirling engines, which the company first used as a mechanical heart-assist pump. And with the $50 million round of funding the privately held company received on Monday, the future looks bright for the solar power generation innovation company.

Stirling engines were first patented in 1816 by Reverend Dr. Robert Stirling in Scotland, out of a concern for his parishioners in the coal means working around dangerous steam engines and boilers, which had a tendency to blow up because of the internal pressure. The original design called for moving air at low pressure, back and forth using an external heat source - and how the engine actually worked was a mystery until French physicist released a paper in 1824 titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire.

The largest-scale use of the Stirling engine was introduced by his brother in 1840, which used the engines for all of his power needs at Dundee Foundry Company, a steel manufacturer.

With the creation of Bessemer process for the production of high-tensile steel, making it possible to build stronger and smaller boilers, the Stirling engine fell into disuse for nearly 100 years. Then, in the late 1930s, Philips Electronics (Royal Philips Electronics N.V.) began tinkering with the Stirling engine as a means for powering radios in remote areas, using the Stirling engine to generate the electricity using lamp oil, which was available virtually anywhere at the time. Philips nearly abandoned the technology for this purpose, but still manufactures cryogenic units and heat exchangers using Stirling engines.

Enter Infinia in 1967, then known as the Stirling Cycle Company which used the Stirling engine to develop heart assist pumps, power systems for NASA's spaceflight missions, and military power systems. In 1995, the company turned its attention full-time to looking at the problems inherent in a Stirling engine, which mainly lies in the regenerative heat exchanger, which circulates heat from the cool end to the hot end, theoretically creating near-perfect efficiencies.

Today, Infinia is negotiating the deployment of their innovative solar dishes, which are roughly the size and appearance of satellite dish technologies from the 1980s. Developlers are planning to install the dishes in the southwestern United States and Spain. Infinia has already deployed one of the 3kW dishes - at its headquarters in Kennewick, Washington.

It takes 334 of the dishes to compete with a typical coal-fired power plant's energy output of 1 megawatt (MW), but Infinia says their technology can do it 20% to 30% cheaper, and with far less maintenance since there are few moving parts and nothing that requires lubrication. Each dish costs approximately $20,000 to manufacture and install, making the comparable construction cost about 7% of that for a coal-fired plant's $1 billion price tag.

"One of the beauties about our Stirling engine is they don't care where the heat comes from, so as long as you can get heat in the engine you can generate power, and in this case, power and we get hot water," Peter Brehm, Infinia Vice President, Business Development told KVEW-TV following last month's State of the State address by Governor Christine Gregoire on January 20, 2008 in which she mentioned Infinia.

GLG Partners and private equity firm Wexford Capital, and included prior investors Vulcan Capital, Khosla Ventures, EQUUS Total Return, Idealab, and Power Play Energy invested in the series B round.