Solar hot shot poised to plug Australia into the sun

Age
Tuesday 27/1/2009 Page: 4

WITH marble-lined corridors and the steepest office rents in Melbourne, 101 Collins Street's tenants are mostly corporate giants such as Macquarie Bank. But the new kid on the block, solar manufacturer Ausra Australia, already feels at home beside its bigger neighbours. This year, the local branch of the US-based company is preparing to announce new deals worth more than $1 billion to build large solar energy plants in at least two Australian states.

Its solar thermal power technology - first developed in New South Wales, and capable of generating electricity on an industrial scale for much less than the cost of traditional photovoltaic panels - is now in hot demand. "We've been working with state and federal governments very closely in the last six to nine months in particular, as well as the mining industry, which is leading the way in interest in off-grid applications," Ausra Australia chief executive Bob Matthews said. "We will have deals (to announce) this year for certain.

It's very difficult to tell you where they are, but they're in two different states and they are very large projects." One of those power plants is likely to use a combination of solar thermal and gas to provide 24-hour baseload electricity to power a remote mining operation. The other is likely to feed extra power into the national electricity grid. But despite his optimistic outlook, Mr Matthews agreed with other solar experts in calling for stronger national policies in Australia, particularly a gross feed-in tariff and loan guarantees, which are driving new investment in countries such as Germany and the United States.

"That's what they're doing elsewhere in the world and that's what really needs to happen here too," he said. Last year, Ausra opened a solar thermal manufacturing factory in Las Vegas and a small-scale power plant in the desert north of Los Angeles. It is now preparing to build a larger 177-MW power plant in central California, able to power 120,000 homes - roughly the equivalent of powering Canberra. It has attracted some high-profile fans, including Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has called Ausra "one of the best companies in California and the world".

It's a great Australian success story. Yet it only happened after its founder, former Sydney University professor David Mills, got so frustrated with successive federal governments' anti-renewables policies that he moved to California's Silicon Valley two years ago to set up Ausra's headquarters there. Ausra's history reflects an ongoing brain drain of Australian solar expertise to countries with long-term investment policies for renewable energy. Among the experts who have been forced to take their technology offshore are former University of New South Wales student Dr Zhengrong Shi, who became China's first solar billionaire, as well as Dr Shi's former professor, Martin Green, whose award-winning thin-film solar panels are now manufactured in Germany.