While companies are adding solar power to warehouse rooftops at a rapid pace, many are still using expensive-to-run lighting systems. A partnership between Orion Energy Systems Inc. and Solyndra Inc. is creating a new combined lighting/solar power system that takes advantage of the sun’s rays in more than one way.

Through the partnership, Orion is encouraging existing customers to invest in Solyndra’s photovoltaics (PVs). The PVs are integrated with Orion’s light tubes in rooftop mounted systems.

Orion’s Apollo Light Tubes are basically advanced skylights. The light tubes use a dome installed on a rooftop to absorb and focus sunlight from all angles, and transmit the light directly into a building where it provides interior lighting that requires little or no externally powered lighting during the daytime.

Solyndra’s unique photovoltaic systems have thin-film PV cells wrapped around tubes. It allows them to produce electricity efficiently as the sun moves across the sky. Since they collect sunlight from all angles, they are mounted parallel to the roof’s surface. Many other modules are oriented at an angle, creating shady spots between the modules.

Solyndra’s flat-mounted PV modules can be placed closer together and don’t interfere with Orion’s light tubes. In combined systems light tubes are mounted between the PV modules, creating a solar system that not only reduces artificial lighting by increasing natural lighting, but also produces renewable energy for use onsite.

Orion’s Vice President of Corporate Communications Linda Diedrich told CEA that through the partnership, the companies have already installed joint solar systems at its Manitowoc, Wis. manufacturing facility and at the Coca Cola Enterprise distribution facility in Coachella, Calif.

The installation in Manitowoc consists of 1,208 panels on the rooftop of its manufacturing facility. Diedrich explained that the system’s production varies “but on a good ‘sun’ day, we are generating approximately 1.3 megawatts of PV power, which Orion sells back to the Manitowoc Public Utility.”

The installations are the first resulting from the partnership announced in December 2009. Diedrich said that the two companies partnered after meeting with President Obama at the White House in March 2009. In a Dec. 11, 2009, press release, John Scribante, president of Orion’s Technology Ventures division, said, “We’ve already begun the deployment of 600 kilowatts of solar capacity into two of our existing Fortune 500 customers’ facilities.”