Power grant boosts sun city vision

Canberra Times
Thursday 13/5/2010 Page: 5

Canberra solar technology company Wizard Power and the ANU's Big Dish project have received a $60 million Commonwealth Government grant to develop a solar power plant in South Australia. The announcement boosts Canberra entrepreneur Tony Robey's long-term vision of a multimillion dollar sophisticated manufacturing industry for Canberra. Announced under the Federal Government's Renewable Energy Development program the grant will help to fund Australia's first commercial concentrating solar power plant and will be the first major deployment in the world for dish technology on this scale.

The Whyalla Solar Oasis will use 300 Wizard Power Big Dish solar thermal concentrators to generate 66GWh (GW hour) of electricity each year; enough to power more than 9500 Australian homes and reduce greenhouse gasses by 60,000 tonnes a year, the equivalent of taking 17,000 cars off Australian roads each year.

Mr Robey, Wizard Power's principal, said this was the company's first commercial project. Other members of the Solar Oasis consortium are NP Power, Sustainable Power Partners and Lycopodium. "Think how many businesses start with a first commercial project of $230 million. It's a wonderful thing for us, for the ANU, for the preceding research they have done and a big thing for the ACT that it has come out of here." The Australian National University's Big Dish is four times the size of any other dish, with unique mirrors and can reach temperatures of more than 2000 degrees Celsius.

Mr Robey said the project would not only deliver clean, renewable energy, it would recognise world leading technology which had been researched, developed and commercialised in Australia. Later this year Wizard Power will release details of a high-tech factory in Canberra capable of turning out $20 million worth of mirrors in a year.

Mr Robey said the company had been exploring solar projects abroad, including in India which was offering attractive feed-in tariff incentives and had priced a 300MW plant, 10 times the size of the Whyalla project. The technology had more applications than solar energy which was attracting attention from potential international partners.

Head of the ANU's Solar Thermal Group Associate Professor Keith Lovegrove, said funding contained in Tuesday's budget would also help to solve one of the greatest obstacles to base-load solar power generation, storing heat to use during peak periods. "This new technology will look at things like can we use phase-change materials, can we use molten salts, can we use solids, and how can we take temperatures of 800 degrees at the concentrator and store that in the ground?" Professor Lovegrove said.

While Spanish solar plants were already using and storing heat for energy generation, the ANU developed systems to be installed at Whyalla worked at double the temperature, potentially increasing the efficiency of the plant and lowering its operating costs. The ANU also received funding for several other renewable energy projects in the budget, including $4.95 million toward research into next-generation solar cells and $4 million for a joint project with the CSIRC) developing advanced solar thermal energy storage technology.