In an Aug. 23, 2010, press release Kalahari Green Tech, Inc. claimed that the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Engineering Experiment Station found that its prototype, Tri-Brid solar thermal collector, was up to 74 percent efficient at converting sunlight into energy. And the company’s press release asserted that the technology would cost half as much as other solar technologies to produce the same amount of power. 

The following day, the company issued another press release saying that it hired Robert Matthews, inventor of the panel, as the company’s vice president and a board of directors member. These and other recent press releases from Kalahari were picked up by MarketWatch, Inc., MSN Money, other major press release aggregators, and various blogs.

On its website, the company said the system does three things: acts as a combination thermo-voltaic collector using both thermal solar and PV technologies, works as an efficient turbine system to convert sunlight into usable energy, and provides thermal conversion to provide hot-water heating and additional electricity generation.

The research conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology is available on Kalahari’s web site, www.kalaharigt.com, as a downloadable PDF. And it indeed shows that the prototype, called the “Sun and Son, Inc. Solar Collector,” was brought to the institute’s Solar Energy and Materials Division for testing. The lab did perform tests and tested the efficiency of the panel over a two-day period, for four hours each day, starting two hours before noon. And at their peak, the panels did show a 74 percent efficiency at converting sunlight into thermal energy.

Looks good, right? Well here’s the thing, the PDF appeared to be scanned and certain information, like contact and date information were covered up.

Georgia Institute of Technology spokesperson Lisa Grovenstein, who handles sustainable technology inquiries at the institute, said that the Engineering Experiment Station was renamed in the late 1970s and that the lead researcher named in the study had left the institute many years ago. She added that the school was now looking into the research to find out more about it.

Kalahari Green Tech and a company named Kalahari Greentech, Inc., did not respond to requests for information by the time this was posted.