Tsars of alternative energy

Australian Financial Review
Saturday 11/8/2007 Page: 22

While the Republic Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has made the US state a magnet for clean energy entrepreneurs and sees the industry as a great economic opportunity, the Australian government still believes any efforts to tackle global warming will cripple economic growth. But even though some sustainable power experts, such as former Sydney University scientist David Mills, have moved to the US, there are still people and businesses in Australia with a vision similar to the California governor's. Success is far from guaranteed in the pursuit of alternative energy, however. But there have been some interesting developments of new technologies, including one by Sylvia Tulloch's company Dyesol, which uses light focused on a titania pigment and a ruthenium dye to produce electricity.

Several companies are on the hunt for a commercially viable way of producing electricity from hot dry rocks beneath the earth's surface, a source that Geoscience Australia estimates could supply 25,000 times the electricity Australia uses now. The biggest of these companies, Geodynamics, is aiming to complete a large-scale demonstration plant within five years. Carnegie Corp is working away at commercial realisation of its goal of generating electricity from wave energy. While the idea is not new, the company is using an innovative approach discovered by West Australian inventor Alan Burns in 1975.

Michael Ottaviano, Carnegie's managing director, is aiming to establish the commercial deployment of the technology, called CETO. Ottaviano says there are sites available for such a project around Australia's coast. He is also seeking to use the wave-generated electricity to help run a desalination plant, such as the planned WA and Victorian plants, or BHP Billiton's possible desalination plant for supplying its huge Roxby Downs mine in South Australia. The potential of the technology is good enough for the federal government, which has provided a minor research and development grant, to lay an indirect claim on it in the title of a report unveiled by Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane.

Another group working on a technology with good potential is the solar energy team at the Australian National University. In 2000, Andrew Blakers and Klaus Weber thought of finding ways to slice the silicon used in photovoltaic cells in such a way as to expose a bigger surface area to sunlight. Origin Energy is now working with them to help develop the idea, now called solar sliver technology.

At Victor Smorgon Group's Energetix, humble algae are hoping to provide a new alternative to energy production. Peter Edwards, managing director of the group, reveals algae can produce considerably more biodiesel than canola, and far more than palm oil. He should know - Energetix already makes biodiesel at a plant in Victoria. Edwards says Energetix is spending significant amounts of money on a profitable commercial development of algae-based biodiesel.