Solar power faces early sunset in Australia

PADDY MANNING June 27, 2009

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Australian support for the solar industry is faltering just as the technology promises to deliver baseload power.

Recent breakthroughs in concentrating solar power technology allow heat energy to be stored almost indefinitely - in molten salts - and dispatched as needed.

The Andasol parabolic trough solar thermal plant near Guadiz in Spain, developed and operated by German company Solar Millenium (which has an Australasian joint venture with Leighton Contractors), generates 50MW of clean electricity with enough storage to run for 7.5 hours without sun and around the clock in summer.

Spanish company Torresol, in joint venture with giant Middle-Eastern clean energy investor MASDAR - which is sniffing for opportunities in Australia - is developing other solar thermal projects near Seville and Cediz.

And there's plenty more coming with Bloomberg reporting 14000MW of solar thermal power stations are in the pipeline in Spain alone. That's enough clean power to run NSW, according to Matthew Wright, of Melbourne-based advocacy group Beyond Zero Emissions.

In the United States, SolarReserve and a division of giant defence contractor United Technologies plan a series of solar thermal "power towers'' in the Californian desert - generating between 50MW and 300MW each - again using molten salts to store energy and able to run 15 hours without sun.

The US Department of Energy predicts that by 2020 concentrating solar thermal power stations with storage will generate clean electricity at a cost of US3c to US6c per kilowatt hour. That's comparable with the cost of existing (and heavily-subsidised) coal-fired power and way cheaper than if the unknown additional cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS) was factored in.

Even better solar technology is being developed here, at the Australian National University, using super-heated ammonia to store energy. A company called Wizard Power is joint venturing with ANU to commercialise the process.

John Grimes, chief executive of the Australian New Zealand Solar Energy Society, fears a bitter replay of earlier brain drains.

"Australian scientists and research and development are at the leading edge of the world,'' he says. "What we lack is government support to commercialise and capitalise on that research.

"We will be the dumb consumers of the technology that we invented.''

The Australian government has shown this month it is all over the place when it comes to solar energy policy.

On a positive note it surprised many when the May budget allocated $1.35 billion to part-fund construction of up to four solar power stations generating as much as 1000MW each.

Contractor Worley Parsons, which last year put forward its Advanced Solar Technology project backed by major resource companies, is one contender (although its proposal doesn't include energy storage as yet).

Grimes is concerned that, amid continuing uncertainty over the Government's renewable energy target and emissions trading scheme - and in the wake of the financial crisis - it will be difficult to raise the matching private capital needed to get those projects off the ground.

Investor confidence would not be helped by the latest triple-whammy of abrupt decisions. The popular $8000 means-tested solar rebate was unilaterally dumped by environment minister Peter Garrett on June 11, a fortnight ahead of schedule, leaving many suppliers, installers and homeowners in the lurch.

Then it was revealed a replacement scheme, to provide solar credits under the new renewable energy target regime, in what was meant to be a smooth transition from July 1, would not be decided until August. Finally this week Garrett axed the Renewable Remote Power Generation program supporting installation of solar energy in remote areas. Continued…

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