By Tom Bayles

Published: Monday, January 25, 2010 at 1:00 a.m.

During the last five years, Sunovia Energy Technologies has gone from an idea to a company that has improved outdoor lighting and solar power to the point where the company and its partner have secured millions in contracts with the federal government and in the Dominican Republic.

The advances in light-emitting diodes and solar power were achieved with $20 million raised from local investors, many of whom live in The Oaks.

Sunovia’s high-powered, low-energy street lights have been purchased by an base in Camp Lejeune, N.C.

The 18-worker company expects to quintuple its number of employees during the next two years as its highly-efficient solar power grids and LED “cobra head” street lights hit the worldwide market.

“Just the cobra light is a monster market,” said Carl Smith, Sunovia’s chairman and chief executive. “There are major profit margins. And you’re talking about energy demands and national security, and those markets are not going to be getting smaller.”

It all started with an idea for a solar-powered cell phone charger.

The genesis

In the days following Hurricane Charley’s devastating trek through Charlotte County and Florida’s interior in 2004, venture capitalists and childhood friends Smith and Craig Hall sat through an interesting pitch for the solar cell-phone recharger.

But the idea fell short when the pair realized there was no cost-effective way to create a universal adapter for the dozens of power ports on the different types of cell phones.

But the use of solar power in a new and innovative way intrigued the pair, and Smith came up with the idea to use solar energy to power LEDs in posters and on bumper stickers.

Dubbed “solartizements,” the items were designed to blink, flash or scroll a message without a power cord. Technical issues scrubbed those plans but gave birth to others.

“What we said at the time was, ‘Why don’t we go and put some of the technology that we were going to put in the solartizements into LED lighting’ and we needed a better solar cell,” Smith said. “That is where the path split into LED lighting and solar.”

The pair spoke to major advertisers and transportation departments in several states to see what they would like in terms of lighting products run by solar energy.

“The solar technology they wanted simply did not exist,” Smith said. “The vision changed and we said, ‘There is a market for this.’”

Sunovia has spent $10 million to create its LED lighting division and $10 million more to secure cutting-edge infrared technologies and to drive solar innovations from concept to manufacturing.

The company is operating in partnership with EPIR Technologies Inc., based in Bolingbrook, Ill., and founded by Siva Sivananthan, director of the Microphysics Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

EPIR has 20 government contracts worth more than $20 million, including the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense and the Missile Defense Agency. The infrared technologies allow for better sight in darkness, dust storms or rainfall at a much lower price than previous systems.

They also improve Sunovia’s solar offerings.

The LED field

For now, the heart of Sunovia, which bills itself as a renewable energy and energy conservation company, is its LED lighting.

While the company offers a line of products for home use, it is its take on the familiar cobra-head-shaped street light that is serving as the company’s first springboard.

Instead of a being filled with several harmful gases and elements, the worst of which is mercury, Sunovia’s street lights consist of an individual LEDs that are shaped like upside-down shot glasses.

The laser-beam-like, bright-white light coming from each one is diverted by “aimed optics” in such a way as to provide complete coverage once the light hits the ground.

Sunovia’s engineers devised an aluminum block to dissipate the extreme heat generated by LEDs inside the cobra head with what looks like a aluminum with the waffled edges akin to those on a car radio amplifier.

The lights require no maintenance for 12 years and use up to 90 percent less electricity than conventional street lights, which need their burnt-out bulbs changed every three years or so.

Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C., already are seeing better at night thanks to nearly 1,100 of Sunovia’s cobra-head lights.

Sunovia also was awarded the contract for 148 street lights along Fruitville Road, which the company says will save Sarasota County approximately $14,000 per year in energy and maintenance costs and reduce carbon emissions by about 710,730 pounds over 10 years, which is roughly what generating the power to produce the light would produce.

At Sarasota Memorial Hospital, the director of facilities, Jim Bugyis, first tried Sunovia’s lights to illuminate some foliage.

“The technology basically exceeded my expectations,” Bugyis said. “I’ve dealt with LED lighting before, and sometimes you don’t get the color rendering you want. But we put these in as kind of a test and was rather impressed when I walked by them at six in the morning and found bright, white light for a good distance.”

That was seven months ago. In December the hospital ordered 14 of Sunovia’s street lights for an employee parking lot.

“I know I can walk out in that parking lot and it will be lit,” Bugyis said. “I was pleased with the fact that the company was local.”

There already are about 10 million conventional cobra-head lights in the United States, and Sunovia said the worldwide market for new ones exceeds $10 billion.

Going solar

While an LED is a semi-conductor that needs energy to produce light, a solar cell is one that needs light to produce energy.

Sunovia and EPIR have developed a solar cell that makes power not just from the visible light part of the spectrum but also from the invisible infrared light.

Timothy Geffert, a principal scientist at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., has been reviewing the sunlight-to-energy products that Sunovia and EPIR have teamed up to produce.

Geffert said Sunovia’s skill in producing the optics package that focuses the sun’s energy onto a highly-efficient solar panel, coupled with EPIR’s expertise in making the device that converts that energy into power, has the potential to be remarkable.

“They may have a chance of making a game-changing product. A lot of people have thought that, but no one has quite put the two pieces together,” he said. “A lot of people have found two really good ideas that, when put together, create a game changer, and that is what it appears Sunovia and EPIR are doing.”

By using an optical system, Sunovia’s satellite-dish-looking solar system concentrates sunlight up to 500 times its normal intensity to produce more electricity in a given area at a cheaper cost than today’s solar technologies, Smith said.

Think of using a magnifying glass to burn a hole in a piece of paper with sunlight.

In one square meter of direct sunlight, there is about 1,000 watts of solar energy available. Sunovia calculates that the flat solar panels that have been used commonly on some roofs for years captures about 150 of those watts.

Sunovia’s panels capture more like 400 of those watts.

In the Dominican Republic, Sunovia has been hired to install a 20-megawatt solar energy to power 10,000 homes, its energy output will be used by manufacturers and other industries.

All of the solar cells for the size from a postage stamp to a playing card, can fit into a suitcase. The panels can be built on-site.

“The goal in solar isn’t to say, ‘How much power can we make’ but ‘How can we make it cheaper.’” Smith said. “It’s a numbers game. We looked at getting all the costs down, so we developed a system that can be assembled on site so you do not have the shipping costs.”

Sunovia and EPIR have expanded the Bolingbrook materials and device fabrication plant, which houses research and development and engineering staff, to 50,000 square feet in the past year.

In November, Sunovia was granted an export license from the U.S. Department of State to sell infrared wafers for night-vision camera applications to a customer in the Far East. The license permits Sunovia to increase its international sales of infrared-related products.

“What has brought the plan together is the completing of production for infrared products to where we can sell it and there is very nice profit in that,” Smith said. “The LED light is the premier product in the industry.”

The investors

Craig Hall, Sunovia’s business adviser, helped Smith find several hundred local investors to raise the $20 million Sunovia has spent so far.

During the last four years, Hall also has helped assemble some of the best minds and paid for the best technologies in infrared, solar and LEDs.

“This year looks pretty bright on the LED lighting end,” Hall said. “This is a good time for what we have going.”

Within a few years, Hall expects Sunovia to market a cobra-light powered by its own solar cell, which will open up vast markets in countries with insufficient power grids.

The infrared technology may be used in missile defense systems, which is a far cry from the partners’ original idea of a blinking bumper sticker.

“Companies may start one way and then they mutate and change,” Hall said. “We weren’t betting anything on just one technology, which the investors like.”

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