Slide 1
(Right, we have slide 1.) Good afternoon everyone again. Look, I’d like to take a bit of your time to tell you a little more about solar thermal power, which is a topic that has been fairly quiet over many years but is just now getting a lot more attention and some of you may know about it and some of you may not but let me tell you a bit more about it. Let’s jump to slide 2. We got slide 2? (yes)

Slide 2
Ok, so I thought I’d start with a little bit of context. And the first context of course, is what our solar resource is like and this map here you can see, something that’s fairly self evident to us all which is to say that Australia is probably, as a continent, has the best solar resource per square metre of anywhere in the world. What could or does that actually mean to us. We jump to slide 3

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Slide 3
And look at this more closely at what the local distribution in Australia is. Dark colours mean more sun, light colours mean less sun and not surprisingly the north-west of Western Australia is probably the best and in fact probably close to the best solar resource in the world. Interestingly, the amount of sun that actually falls in north-west Western Australia is only twice as much as falls on Melbourne so it’s not… although (you know) it’s a big difference in a sense, it’s not all this magnitude, it’s only a factor of two. Now, what does all that sun actually mean? The little green square you can see there is a bit of a thought experiment which is to say, what if we tried to meet all of Australia’s primary energy needs, and the ABS will tell us that 5500 Peta Joules per annum, that’s essentially all fossil fuel usage. Supposing we wanted to displace all of that, not just electricity, all fossil fuel usage. Well the energy that we’ll need could be in fact, collectively could be something the size of that green square, which is 138km by 138. but it’s supposed to be a realistic representation of something where we covered the land and only used the 20% footprint of collectors of some sort, with a 20% efficiency, so that puts it into context. There’s plenty of energy out there. I’m not actually seriously saying we should do it in one square in western NSW like that, because we can spread it all around. Put this square into context in another way, it’s also something equivalent to the total area of rooves in the country, so that’s another way of looking at it too. So moving onto slide 4.

Slide 4
How are we going to do this? Well, I’d actually say we can achieve 100% renewable energy with today’s technologies. Let’s go to slide 5

Slide 5
And have a think about what it could mean to do 100% renewable energy. And work through one lifestyle that is about the technology choices that we need to make. The easiest thing of all to just make our houses some what better and I imagine other people this afternoon will tell you more about that in detail but what it takes to make a house that needs no energy for heating or cooling is actually a very simple thing. Simply solar gain, good insulation and good solar mass will do it and of course you’ll notice a solar hot water panel on the roof. Moving to slide 6.

Slide 6
There’s already proven ways of meeting our transport needs from renewable means. We hear about ethanol, we hear about biodiesel, these are fuels that can go straight into existing cars. Jumping to slide 7.

Slide 7
We also know that we’ve got hybrid electric cars on the market. I see them as a transition technology if you like. Down the bottom corner there is a picture of a solar racing car such as the one’s that go from Darwin to Adelaide each year. What do they represent? They’re kind of the Formula 1 of electric cars, if you like. Not something we would actually do the shopping in ourselves. But it’s helping them develop the technology. So we’ve got transport options there. We’ve got housing options. As we go to slide 8.

Slide 8
That leaves our large scale electricity production and what I’m suggesting there is that we need a portfolio. So jumping ahead to slide 9.

Slide 9
To the subject of my talk if you like. Although, we need a portfolio of electricity generating technologies, I’d like to now talk about a subset of that portfolio, namely solar thermal power. So on this slide we can see the three, if you like, standard approaches to achieving solar thermal power production. In the background there is the parabolic trough option. So what you can see is, well, parabolas in cross-section, very long toughs made out of mirrors. You can see a person down in the foreground there to give you a sense of the scale. These things track from side to side and follow the sun and focus it to the pipe that you can see in the centre of each trough. That gets up to about 400 degrees, carries a heat transfer oil and takes heat to the power generating system. In the middle there, we have what’s called a central receiver tower system, a big tower with a surrounding field of mirrors that focus the sun and take it up to a peak focal point on top of the tower. And in the top right hand corner, the parabola dish approach which is of course what we do at ANU so more about that later. But these things focus the sun to a point and attract the sun into actives. Ok then, slide 10.

Slide 10
A bit more depth on these things. A little bit of history. This image is a 10MW electrical system that was built in southern California but it’s now moth-balled so not much more to say about that. Jumping to slide 11. (laughter)

Slide 11
(righto) This on the other hand is definitely not moth-balled. These trough plants have been going in the Californian desert for 20 years. Even as we speak, well maybe not as we speak because it will be the middle of the night. Day in day out, these things have been going. Total installed capacity there is 364MW. To put that in context, it will be enough installed capacity to run a city the size of Canberra, or I suppose about a third of Melbourne. So it’s not enough to run the whole world, that’s for sure, but it’s already utility scale and you’ve been running for 20 years – you can’t get much more proven than that for a technology. Ok, slide 12

Slide 12
Just shows the power block. And a very key point to make here with this solar thermal technology; the plants to date have used standard steam turbine power generating equipment so most of the world’s electricity comes from the steam turbine. If the transition we make is to just replace the source of the heat, that’s a much easier transition than replacing everything altogether so less threatening for industry, you could say. Ok, jumping forward

Slide 13
The good news is although nothing much has happened for a decade, in the last 18 months there’s actually a boom on.. um.. there’s a lot of activity in solar thermal now. And the reasons for that. I mean the biggest growth industry in renewable power has been the wind industry over the last couple of decades with 30% per annum growth. Why did wind take the lead? I would argue it’s because the policy issues came out of Western Europe and they have more wind and sun. But now people in Western Europe and people in the US are looking a bit further ahead and in Europe they even talk about solar thermal plants in northern Africa feeding electricity into Europe and so on. So the smiley faces there represent the plants that have actually been completed in recent times and there’s more being constructed. As we jump down to slide 14.

Slide 14
The most recently completed power plant and indeed this single plant would be the biggest solar plant in the world at the moment. It was only just completed. 64MW electrical and a fairly notable observation to make is that construction started February last year so less than 15 months from go to woe, a 64MW plant on the grid providing power, and given that they were fairly out of practice, they can probably even get faster. Or more to the point, given that these things are somewhat modular and a power block probably is as hard to build whether it’s big or small, you could arguably do a 600MW plant in virtually the same time once the operation was scaled up a bit so there’s enormous potential for growth in this industry. Ok slide 15.

Slide 15
Latest version of a tower plant that was started March this year. Jump forward to slide 16.

Slide 16
We see that some of the 120m2 heliostats in the new Spanish plant. Slide 17.

Slide 17
Notice that in the initial stages, they bussed in tourists to move the mirrors but I believe now they’ve automated it. The tower in the background you can see the spots from one heliostat and the big square is where the boiler now is. Now it’s a big square. These pictures were taken in June last year when it was still being completed. Slide 18.

Slide 18
Different approach. It’s a compact linear fresnel array (CLFR), it’s a kind of, a linear version of a tower system. And this is coming back closer to home now. A company called Solar Heat and Tower, who might have seen in the news, who moved their headquarters to California but nonetheless they’re still building this demonstration at Liddel power station. Moving along. Slide 19.

Slide 19
A version of a dish system. Might skip over that because I guess we’re using up the time.

Slide 20
Solar Systems is the Melbourne based company that also does dishes. Their conversion system at the receiver there is to actually use very high efficiency photovoltaics. One of the interesting things with dish concentrators is there’s actually a whole range of technologies options one can apply at the focus, once you’ve concentrated the radiation.

Slide 21
There’s a few slides here that we’ll skim over quickly (Adrian) just to show you there’s a lot of other projects, proposed plans or in various stages of approval. Some of these will see the light of day and some won’t. So slide 21, 22 and 23 just to give you a sense that a lot of things that are planned and quite a few will come into being I’m sure. Righto, slide 24.

Slide 24
A gratuitous photo of myself there (laughter). The ANU technology is about to be demonstrated and this thing in the Canberra Times was about a grant from the Australian greenhouse Office to that effect so…

Slide 25
Slide 25 is another shot of ANU’s solar dish concentrator, as was on the first slide. So our dish is 400m2 which actually makes it the world’s largest dish by a factor of about 3. You can see it’s all mirror and focuses all the radiation onto the receiver at the top of the tower there. And that receiver makes super heated steam directly. And a very important point to make about these dish concentrators is that they can achieve higher concentration ratios than say the troughs and therefore higher temperatures. And whether the receiver likes the one we have there, we can make any temperature or pressure of steam that anyone’s made a steam turbine for in the world. We can match the needs of any generating plant that anyone has built in the world. Move on to…

Slide 26
Close up of the receiver without the sun on it. Probably a bit to see the detail but what you might probably be able to make out is that the centrally it’s a spiral of tubing with a cross-section that looks like a top hat and the water is just, sort of, winding its way through the tubing. Going in is warm water, coming out is super heated steam. Slide 27.

Slide 27
I’d like to introduce you to the idea of energy storage and slide... you’ll hear a lot of talk about renewables are lovely but they can’t do base load and they are too intermittent and these comments typically come from people who are looking for other reasons not to support renewables, it seems to me. An interesting observation there is, that there’s been a lot of studies and I actually saw it quoted in the recent nuclear review actually, an acceptance that you could have up to 20% from renewable electricity from intermittent sources in the grid before managing it even becomes a problem. So storage is not really the issue but in the long run, storage is a handy thing. So how are we going to do storage. Jump to slide 28.

Slide 28
And there’s an approach that people – one of the consortiums building power plants. They quite simply store a tank of hot liquid and that’s it. Store enough hot liquid in an insulated tank, you can have storage for as long as you like.

Slide 29
Slide 29 is another observation. Before we worry too much about energy storage, consider your basic solar hot water system – that has built in energy storage. Inherently we have, I believe, 5.6% market share for solar hot water in Australia, which is, considering we are the sunniest continent, is kind of ridiculous. If we moved to 100% solar hot water they would be cheaper, it would save us money as a country. We could probably offset or avoid the need for two complete large-scale coal fired power stations, even by doing that so there’s something else before you need to worry too much about storage. Ok.

Slide 30
Slide 30 on the other hand, is the ANU’s approach for, let’s say for a longer term solution to the storage issues and I think with the time limitations, I won’t try to explain it tin detail, especially if I can’t point at it, well rather I can but you won’t be able to see me… (audience laughter). It’s a reversible chemical reaction. We’re trying to achieve an effect like your battery, if you like, heat battery. So heat in and heat out. We’re doing by reversing, disassociating ammonia and that happens at the receiver of our dish. We store it and at the other end, we put it all back together again and we get the same thing with power generation. So what was the vision? Look, could I actually go to slide 31.

Slide 31
That’s how to think about it. These dishes are not for use as single dishes. We imagine them whether they’re making steam or splitting ammonia very large arrays of them in fairly large power plants. Let’s say several MW upwards to hundreds of MW. So lots of dishes all networked together with a single central power station. Which still looks like a steam turbine thing but actually has as ammonia synthesis reactor putting out the heat 24 hours a day with the dishes basically topping up the storage during sunlight hours. So how far fetched is this? If we jump to slide 32.

Slide 32
What you see is well, the core power generation part of that proposal is industry standard. It’s the fertilizer industry basically. That picture in the background is an ammonia synthesis reactor system up in Brisbane that’s been running essentially continuously since 1960 so we might actually get a newer shinier one. But it’s a 100 year old industry – it is one of the oldest chemical processed in the world and modern plants already have built in co-generation, so the entire power block heat recovery part of the system is available off the shelf. Ok.

Slide 33
Slide 33 just shows you where we’re at in terms of testing the solar part of it. That’s the sort of, shot of the alternative receiver we need to do it and down the bottom there is the catalyst material that goes in the tubes to speed up the reaction.

Slide 34
Slide 34. A quick comment on why ANU advocates dishes, rather than other alternatives. Essentially if you go through the numbers, we pick up a higher optical efficiency and higher thermal efficiency in the receiver and that also propagates through. Our turbines will be the same as anyone else’s turbines but at the end of the day, we think we’ll get twice the electrical output per area of mirror. So that’s just in case you’re following that route.

Slide 35
Slide 35. Just to make the point on slide 35, ANU technology is now being commercialized by this company called Wizard Power. Skip over that.

Slide 36
36. The projects we’re currently working on. We’re re-engineering the dish design for mass manufacture and we have this four year project to demonstrate a small power station with storage.

Slide 37
Slide 37. Where is solar thermal power going? I think we can learn from the wind industry. It’s very similar. It’s about manufacturing, the use of steel and glass and not rocket science. Wind industry has grown exponentially and costs have declined. And we can expect the same.

Slide 38
Slide 38 shows some results from an American study that projects how they, well they look at towers and troughs but we think it’s very comparable – their projection on how costs will go.

Slide 39
What did the Nuclear Review think? There’s a very interesting point here, I’ve modified the graphs a bit. On the far left hand side, you can see what they said in the press release on the cost. I’ve added rather bigger red column, which, if you read the fine print of their report – their own report – you actually get the big red column of the possible price range. Interestingly they put solar thermal in the same ball park as all the things like clean coal type solutions. So that’s, sort of, in agreement with what Wizard Power thinks for example. So that I would actually argue that in the market place, solar thermal power has got a chance of doing quite well.

Slide 40
Slide 40. A little question to think about. Coal is our biggest export, what should we replace it with when nobody wants our coal and when you look at how much money we make out of uranium, you see that it’s actually stuff all and even if we doubled it, it’s 3/5 of stuff all (audience laughter). But compared to the coal it’s nothing much because uranium is worth hardly anything per MJ. Coal is worth a lot per MJ. So if our customers switch, our economy’s in trouble.

Slide 41
Here’s a thought. We could actually export solar energy. How would we do that? Well, we would do that by using, for example, solar thermal systems can gasify biomass and even, dare I say it, gasified coal, in which case the final energy content is a mixture of solar and fossils. You can synthesise all that stuff into methanol and ship it overseas and quite literally power Japan, given that they’re 40% dependent on Middle Eastern oil at the moment and not very happy about that. It’s quite conceivable to imagine Australia as an exporter of solar energy. Ok, better wrap it up.

Slide 42
Ok 42, some conclusions. ANU’s kicking along. Solar thermal has got potential. Gasification of hydrocarbons could give us export incomes. And the last two slides I thought I’d just throw in as gratuitous advertising.

Slide 43
43. Solar Energy Society, of which I’m a part, has a conference in Alice Springs and if people are interested in more technical detail and what to know the cutting edge in solar research, that’s the place to come and finally the last slide is a bit of a plug for sustainable house day… always looking for volunteers for that. So there I will leave it. Thanks Adrian. (applause, thank you)

Questions

Keith Yes sure, no worries.

MC: Would anyone like to ask any questions?
Keith, do you have an estimate on what the potential value of solar export might be?

Keith:, I think the way I’m looking at it is, if we did that green square which was Japan’s primary energy usage. I mean I think we could easily, technically, with something on that scale, equal the value of our coal exports. That’s, that’s my proposition. I’m saying that there is, there is enough energy and the technical viability to – if there was a market – to export on the same scale as we currently export coal, which is about $25 million a year.

MC: could you repeat the detail of getting sunshine into exportable methanol in layman’s terms.

Keith: ok, sunshine to methanol. Let’s, let’s take a 100% renewable solution. First we have our biomass and one of the interesting prospects is there is algae. I’ve heard of talk of algae. We took that biomass, we mix it in with a little bit of water, we pump it through the receiver of a dish concentrator for example, at about 800°C. A whole series of chemical reactions take place at that high temperature and essentially what you end up with, is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Now hydrogen carbon monoxide is the feedstock for a whole lot of standard chemical processes. One of which is the synthesis of methanol. Um and methanol is a liquid. V8 Supercars run on it so it must be good stuff. It’s … transportable, um, there’s other options too. Because you can go a step further and actually synthesise a diesel substitute as well. Um anyway that’s it.

MC: Yep, another question? We’ll take 2 more, 3 more. What are the barriers to widespread solar deployment?
Keith: Ah, it’s only about market and policy really. I think if we, if we had a… if the Victorian government introduced an extra amount of renewable energy target. If we would grow our mandatory renewable energy target. I mean the evidence with the federal MRET scheme is that ever since it was instituted, the industry has been ahead of the targets the whole time. So the industry is well capable of growing, faster than targets have been instituted so far. And I think what we will find is that solar thermal power is going to come into its own. I mean it’s taking off around the world. If there’s a market in Australia, it will take off here too.

MC: How have your government fundings for your department developed over the last few years?

Keith: What’s happened in the last, you know, few decades is that pure research funding for universities have been increasingly harder to get. There’s a lot of funding schemes which are dollar for dollar matching and require industry to put in half the money. Now for us the… ah, that news item that talks about stuff with the tower. You know we say, we have to say that we’re doing ok because we’ve got some significant government funding grants there that’s really helping that commercialization phase. But pure um, dedicated research funding to research institutions is fairly hard to come by. But nonetheless what I would actually ask of government more than anything else is probably the policy initiatives about growing the market more than anything else, because that’s really, I mean this is applied research leading to commercial products that need to get in the market place.

MC: Is there an internet site where this presentation is available or are we allowed to put it up on our site?

Keith: Yeah, you’re welcome to put it up on your site Adrian. That’s fine. At the very front of this presentation there was a, the group’s website where you can certainly see extra information although, I don’t have the presentation there…
http://engnet.anu.edu.au/DEresearch/solarthermal
Yes, you’re welcome to put it up on your site.

MC: We’ll do that for attendees.

Keith: If there’s anyone out there wanting to do a PhD, give us a call. (laughter)

MC: Do you have to be an engineer or can you just come from Year 10 like me?

Keith: Oh, if you’re particularly bright, you can probably do that (more audience laughter)

MC: A question about embodied energy. Energy payback. How long would it take?

Keith: We’ve had a quick look at that, it depends on the assumptions you make of course. The high energy payback time is quite a subtle sort of issue. But let’s say roughly speaking um, about 12 months or slightly more for a solar thermal system. Wind power probably does the best there, I dunno, 6 or 7 months. Photovoltaic systems are rather worse. A couple of years, three years maybe. That’s the sort of thing but given that all these things are around for 20 – 25 years, it’s not really a big issue.

MC: Is it rational for individuals to pursue photovoltaic systems on houses, when there’s sort of, economics wise and things like that, when there’s the centralized solutions that you’re looking at could provide more power?

Keith: I would say yes actually. Because I mean, the PV process. I mean PV is a booming industry in their own right and plus, they are getting prices down and I would actually say one would reach the time when PV on rooves really makes sense. And you could say well, if it’s that good then what role does that leave for solar thermal? Well, what I would say to that is in this portfolio, we could have PV on all of our roofs. But PV doesn’t do storage, solar thermal does storage really well and solar thermal can do these chemical processes for fuels. So they actually complement each other quite nicely so I mean, if anybody’s out there contemplating taking the government up on their expanded rebate, I’d say go for it because that rebate is actually very generous at the moment. I mean you still have to be very committed to do it but it’s great. If you’re thinking about your own home’s economics, I would say make sure that you’ve got solar hot water first because that really will save you money. And make sure you’ve insulated your house. If you have the capital available, PV on roofs is a great thing and it also helps send a message to everyone else in the community who’s not at your conference at the moment.

MC: And you can use solar thermal to back up wind power, can’t you?

Keith: Yeah, absolutely yes.

MC: Alright, thanks very much. Thanks Keith (applause)