Power of Experience

In 1996, Stirling Energy Systems, Inc. (SES) was formed and acquired all design and engineering patents on the solar Stirling dish engine technology that had been developed over nearly three decades by some of the world’s top engineers and scientists in Ford Advanced Development Operations, McDonnell-Douglas Aerospace & Defense and Boeing Aerospace & Defense.

Shortly thereafter, SES launched two strategic, collaborative public–private partnerships with Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, New Mexico USA and the United States Department of Energy (DOE).

Over this period, SES has re-engineered the SunCatcher™ technology, perfected its design, performance and cost, while achieving the world’s highest solar-to-electricity conversion efficiency record, making it ready for high capacity manufacturing and world scale commercialization.

Proven to Work

Today, the SunCatcher™ is a 25-kilowatt-electric (kWe) solar dish Stirling system that simply takes the energy from the sun and converts it into grid quality energy. It's pure power made simple. The SunCatcher technology uses no fuel, is emissions free, and uses less water than other solar technologies; providing a clean, efficient, reliable source of energy.

The SES SunCatcher™ is the result of more than a decade of innovative engineering and validation testing, with hundreds of thousands of hours of on-sun testing on each major sub-system, and over 50,000 hours on-sun testing for the complete system. Each SunCatcher™ is powered by its own solar dish Stirling engine. Since its invention in 1816, the Stirling engine design, engineering and performance have been rigorously tested for nearly 200 years across multiple industry applications. The SunCatcher™ is the only CSP technology to use a patented and world record efficiency Stirling engine technology. Other CSP technologies utilize steam turbines to convert solar heat to electricity.