Ausra Shining Brightly Over The Pacific  

Red Herring has a look at ex-Australian solar thermal power company Ausra and their expansion plans in the US and beyond.

Standing out in the increasingly crowded solar energy space isn’t easy these days. But Australian-American startup Ausra seems to have managed to do just that. Named after an ancient Indo-European goddess of the dawn, Palo Alto, California-based Ausra is a solar thermal technology company that, unlike many of its rivals, touts a means to produce electricity from sunlight that requires less fuss than conventional methods and could lower the cost of generating utility-scale power.

“You’d be mad to build a gas plant or a coal plant when there are technologies like this around,” said CEO Peter Le Lièvre, who helped form the company late last year. Solar thermal power plants capture heat from sunlight and use it to generate electricity.

Ausra uses relatively inexpensive 40-foot-long flat plate mirrors–called Fresnel reflectors–to concentrate the sun’s rays directly on water pipes, boiling the water to run steam turbines, which, in turn, generate electricity, according to a company representative. The system, which the company says has the potential to generate electricity for two-thirds the cost of its competitors, has attracted more than $40 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ausra said Monday.

Concentrated solar power plants generally use trough-like structures whose curved mirrors focus sunlight onto tubes of oil. The heat from the oil is then used to create steam and to drive the electricity-generating turbine. But the mirrors must be precisely shaped and mounted on sun-tracking devices, requirements that make them more costly to make and repair, according to Ausra’s executive vice president, John O’Donnell.

Ausra says its system can bring down the cost of solar power-generated electricity to be competitive with conventionally generated electricity. Ausra’s Freshnel reflectors are flat, unlike the curved, finely tuned mirrors of the traditional trough design, according to the company. “It’s a mindset that’s much more like Toyota than like NASA,” Mr. O’Donnell said. Ausra also directly heats water to generate steam, rather than first heating oil to generate heat. But the system is less efficient at converting solar energy to electricity than trough systems because it generates lower-temperature steam, Mr. O'Donnell said.

Ausra was originally founded in 2002 as Solar Heat and Power in Australia by David Mills, who originated the technology in the early 1990s at Sydney University, and Graham Morrison, who helped him develop it from 1995 to 2001. Solar Heat and Power built a one-megawatt pilot project in Australia for Macquarie Generation in New South Wales in 2004. The company, which changed its name to Ausra and moved to the United States in February, is also working on a second 38-megawatt capacity power plant it expects to have finished by 2009.

The company plans to build a 180-megawatt power plant at an undisclosed United States location, and is beginning construction on a 6.5-megawatt plant in Portugal, according to Messrs. Le Lièvre and O’Donnell. The company also plans to open offices in California, Colorado, and Arizona and to double its staff to 100 by the end of the year, they said.

After Gutenberg also has some comments on Ausra, noting the system is still dependent on water availability - though this is purely for turning turbines rather than cooling as in many coal and nuclear plants, so presumably this could be a nearly closed loop system (more at San Jose Mercury, Clean Break and The Energy Blog).

Ausra’s core technology is the CLFR (Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector). Instead of the parabolic troughs or mirrors used in other solar thermal systems, this form of CSP (Concentrating Solar Power) uses flat reflectors moving on a single axis plus Fresnel lens to concentrate the solar thermal energy in collectors. Flat mirrors are much cheaper to produce than parabolic ones. Another advantage of CLFR is that it allows for a greater density of reflectors in the array. David Mills originally conceived of the approach in the early 1990s while at Sydney University.

Currently, Ausra is building a 30 MW solar thermal electric power plant, and in the process of scaling up to 2,000 MW over the next three years — enough power for two million homes in the United States. Founded by Dr. David Mills (who has spent the past three decades in Australia), Ausra got its big break last summer; Mills got to meet solar thermal advocate and venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla. “It’s a great story, really,” observers Toronto Star reporter, Tyler Hamilton1. “After years of trying to attract serious interest in his technology in Australia, Mills says he was getting ready to throw in the towel and retire.” ...

“Worldwide, the electric power industry creates 40 percent of total carbon emissions, and electricity use is rapidly growing. Ausra’s technology serves a critical need for utilities seeking large-scale affordable sources of clean power to meet the dual challenges of economic growth and carbon constraints,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and Ausra investor and board member.

One solar thermal electric power plant, the 354 MW SEGS (Solar Energy Generating Systems), which covers 1000 acres in the Mojave Desert in Southern California, produces 90% of the world’s commercially produced solar power. One might perceive such a major effort as an impetus for new investors to believe in the potential of solar thermal.

Ausra aims to expedite the utility industry’s transition to clean energy, helping utilities meet renewable portfolio standards while keeping rates low and the power on for consumers day and night. “Economic development around the world, coupled with recognition that carbon emissions must rapidly be eliminated, has created an enormous market opportunity for companies that can deliver solar power at large scale and at reasonable cost,” says KPCB Partner and Ausra investor and board member Ray Lane.

Lane sees solar thermal electric power generation as a “main event in renewable energy”. It may be, provided that potential water shortages are addressed. As with other steam turbine systems, solar thermal is susceptible to a shortage of water.

The press release did answer one question. I wondered why, since investors were willing to put $40 million into CSP, specifically the Ausra Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector, then had foregone the combined technology developed at MIT. “We had been working on a wide range of alternatives and kept finding that simpler, cheaper approaches outperformed higher-temperature, more sophisticated designs,” says Ausra Chairman David Mills.

Technology Review has an article on cheaper solar cells from thin film solar manufacturer Heliovolt.

Powered by $77 million in new investment, startup Heliovolt, based in Austin, TX, will build a factory next year for mass-producing a new type of solar cell that could, in much of the United States, make solar electricity as cheap as electricity from the grid. The company will be scaling up a new manufacturing technique that could produce high-performance thin-film solar cells more reliably than other methods.

Heliovolt is one of several startups developing a type of thin-film solar cell that converts light into electricity with a micrometers-thick layer of a copper-indium-gallium selenide (CIGS) semiconductor. Thin-film solar cells are attractive because they could produce electricity cheaper than conventional silicon solar cells. Although thin-film cells produce less electricity per square meter than conventional silicon solar cells do, they make up for this by using orders of magnitude less active material per square meter. This can result in significant savings. For example, generating one watt of electricity requires about 80 cents' worth of silicon, but it only requires a penny's worth of a semiconductor used in a thin-film cell, says John Benner, who manages electronic materials for photovoltaics research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO. (Heliovolt is working with NREL to further develop its cells.)

The challenge has been to reliably make thin-film solar cells at a large scale. In the lab, CIGS solar cells have shown the highest efficiency of any thin-film cell (19.5 percent), exceeding that of some types of silicon solar panels made today. But, while no one expects to reach this level of efficiency in mass-produced cells, it has proved difficult to reliably make them with even a minimum level of efficiency needed to compete with other types of solar cells.

Heliovolt's new manufacturing method, however, could prove more reliable than others, Benner says, by providing more control over the composition of the semiconductor film. ...

So far the company has demonstrated the process only on relatively small, 15-centimeter-wide solar modules. Its goal for early next year is to build a factory to produce, first, 30-centimeter modules, and later--most likely sometime after June--prototypes of modules that are about three-quarters of a square meter (60 by 120 centimeters). The larger size is necessary for bringing the product in line with standard module sizes, making them cheaper to install. The factory will be designed to produce enough cells per year to generate 20 megawatts of electricity at first, and eventually 40 megawatts. A typical wind turbine, in comparison, might generate two megawatts of electricity.

The first of the company's large cells will have efficiencies of 10 to 12 percent, Stanbery estimates, or slightly better than other thin-film solar cells. In 10 years, he expects those figures to increase to 13 to 15 percent, or good enough to compete with some types of conventional silicon solar cells. Stanbery also expects to manufacture cells for less than First Solar, a Phoenix, AZ-based maker of a different type of thin-film solar cell that has seen high demand for its products.

Red Herring also has an article on Finavera Renewables and their wind and water power plans.

Jason Bak, an applied physicist by training, found gold and diamonds in the Canadian arctic in the late 1990s using electromagnetic techniques. In Ireland, he worked for a gold mine that sold for 30-times its purchase price. But it was a less ostentatious money-making prospect that inspired him to launch Finavera Renewables, a Vancouver-based startup that sees a business opportunity in producing electricity from wind and ocean waves. Unlike gold, whose price can be extremely volatile, electricity generated by wind mills and offshore wave farms is a commodity whose future is always bright, argues CEO Mr. Bak. “Electricity only gets more expensive,” he said. “It never gets cheaper. It’s a commodity that’s always growing in price.”

Finavera’s approach is to use wind projects to generate revenue, while the company works to develop its wave energy technology, according to Mr. Bak. That fledgling technology took a couple of baby steps last week a few miles off the coast of Newport Beach, Oregon, where Finavera put the latest version of its wave energy converter device, dubbed AquaBuOY, into the Pacific. The device floats atop the ocean and uses rubber hose-pumps to convert the vertical motion of the waves into pressurized seawater. That pressurized seawater, in turn, powers the turbines that drive an electrical generator. Previous versions, according to Mr. Bak, used metal rods, which were more costly and more trouble to maintain. This stepping stone “allows us to prove the concept,” said Mr. Bak. “The next step is simply increasing the power output of our technology [which would] reduce our unit cost of energy.” AquaBuOY generates a maximum of 250 kilowatts at any instant in time, he said.

Finavera’s system is moored, rather than mounted, to the ocean floor. That simple feature means less red tape and fewer headaches, as regulations for seafloor-mounted installations can be complicated, the company said.

Next year the company plans to develop and test the third-generation of AquaBuOY and, by 2009, it hopes to put four of the devices in the water and connect them to the grid via an undersea transmission line, Mr. Bak said.

In addition to the Newport Beach test site, Finavera has a demonstration site in Makah Bay, Washington, and is developing projects in Coos County, Oregon; Figueira da Foz, Portugal; Ucluelet, Canada; and South Africa.

The Australian and The Age note that new company Wind Hydrogen has floated on the ASX at a discount to its issue price, however I think the model of combining renewable power with energy storage technology will be standard practice before too long.

Wind Hydrogen's $12 million whip-around is aimed at developing a pipeline of early stage projects, mainly in Britain but also in Victoria. Wind Hydrogen boasts a patented hydrogen balancing system, by which off-peak wind energy is used to create hydrogen for use in high-demand periods.

Not even the exhortations of Wind Hydrogen's venerable chairman -- The Honorable Neville K. Wran AC, QC -- were enough to save the 20c shares from tanking, admittedly on a crap day to list. Wind Hydrogen notes the company does not have any producing wind farms -- or in some cases approval to build such a facility -- so is "speculative in nature".

IEEE Spectrum has an article on zero emissions buildings.

It may be a first: an office building with a net electricity use of zero or less, that burns no fossil fuels for heating and produces no greenhouse gas, and that makes the people working there at least as comfortable as those in conventionally heated and cooled buildings. The building, in San Jose, Calif., opens in October, and if all goes according to plan, it will raise the bar for designers of energy-efficient buildings worldwide. Though other so-called z-squared buildings exist, they are highway rest stops, nature centers, and event locations, not office structures with computers and printers and cubicles full of employees.

“We’ve hoisted the flag and said we’re the first,” says David Kaneda. “No one yet has stepped forward to question that.” He owns the San Jose building, and his Santa Clara, Calif.–based firm, Integrated Design Associates (IDeAs), did the electrical and lighting design and will occupy the ground floor.

The building was once a windowless bank, designed in the 1960s when banks were meant to be riot-proof concrete bunkers. Today, with the remodeling nearly completed, it is modern art: the exterior is broken up with rows of windows and swaths of blue and gray paint, while solar panels adorn the roof, with skylights pushing up in between.

Kaneda embarked on the project of renovating the old bank in September 2005, with the goal of creating an environmentally friendly building that could earn a Platinum rating—the highest—from the U.S. Green Building Council, an association of builders in Washington, D.C. At that time, global climate change was not in the forefront of public consciousness, and the council’s standards were not much in the public eye. So Kaneda thought he was being very forward-thinking when he proposed to renovate the bank to meet the council’s specifications for building materials, water use, indoor air quality, and—most important—energy use.

But when Kaneda hired architect Scott Shell, from EHDD Architecture, in San Francisco, to work on the project, Shell went even further, suggesting they design a building with no net electricity usage and no carbon dioxide emissions. “It was a shock to me when he said that,” Kaneda recalls. He didn’t know of any commercial buildings that had gone that far.

The idea appealed to Kaneda, and the two decided they would disconnect the natural gas pipes running to the building and find heating alternatives. They would stay on the electric grid but install enough photoelectric panels to cover the entire energy load—about 30 kilowatts, generating more electricity than the building uses during the day but pulling a small amount off the grid at night. Since they’d be limited by the size of the roof, they’d have to be clever about energy use.

“To cut down on energy use, you’ve got three areas to address,” Kaneda says, “lighting, heating and cooling, and plug load—that is, the computers, printers, microwave ovens, and other things you plug into the wall.” ...

Energy Bulletin points to a review of a book called "Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society" by a local professor at UNSW named Ted Trainer. I'm increasingly baffled by these sorts of claims - there is far more energy available from renewable energy sources than we could ever use, even in the most wasteful consumer society spread to every person on the planet. Many of the technologies to do this are well proven and fairly cheap (wind, solar thermal, solar hot water) or rapidly becoming viable (thin film solar, geothermal, ocean energy sources, some biofuels) and the supplementary technologies required to make it all work (energy storage, demand management techniques) are also becoming widely understood and getting ready to be rolled out. So where do people get these "energy descent" ideas from ?

Ted Trainer, of the University of New South Wales, has made a valuable contribution to the literature of energy and resource depletion with his new book Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society.

The title says a lot I think. With the focus of most mainstream debate on peak oil and energy being on the supply side - the oil is running low so what are we going to use instead? - Trainer brings a refreshing approach in which he provides a detailed and technically comprehensive analysis of existing renewable energy options- including wind, solar thermal, solar electric, biomass and energy crops, and hydrogen, as well as nuclear and the issue of storing energy. He concludes:

…we could easily have an extremely low per capita rate of energy consumption, and footprint, based on local resources- but only if we undertake vast and radical change in economic, political, geographical and cultural systems.

In the first section he outlines the context in which these discussions have been taking place: a context full of “Greenwash” and wild exaggerations on behalf of some renewable energy suppliers, which has been repeated by the media and left the public with a quite illusory understanding of what renewables can and cannot do. ...

Bart at Energy Bulletin comments "Trainer's figures on renewables have been and will continue to be disputed. However, one thing is not in dispute. The move away from fossil fuels will be much much easier with some of the cultural changes that he describes as 'The Simpler Way.'". While I've got no problem with people implementing any of the many "dark green" options out there, I fail to see the point in grossly underestimating the availability and reliability of "bright green" alternatives - both will be needed in future, and both will be put into play...


Links:

* Jetson Green - Modern Solar Powered LED Lights Taking Off
* MSNBC - Belgian solar powered climate station unveiled in Antarctica
* Forbes - Sector Snaps: Solar Power
* CNN - XsunX Leverages Milan Trade Show to Finalize 100MW Solar Module Production Facility Plans
* The Energy Blog - Evergreen Solar Breaks Ground on Manufacturing Plant in Massachusetts
* UPI - Analysis: Solar energy in Uzbekistan
* AP - Solar plane flies longer than any other
* TreeHugger - Breaking News In The Wind: Long Island Might Come Back, Delaware On The Move
* The Energy Blog - American Electric Power to Install Six MW of NAS® Battery Storage
* Technology Review - More-Efficient Phone Displays
* Technology Review - Environmentally Friendly Fridges. "A new magnetic-cooling system could lead to more-energy-efficient refrigerators"
* Auto Blog Green - Are hydraulic hybrids more efficient than electric hybrids ?
* EPRI - EPRI Wave Energy Conversion (WEC) Project
* Green Car Congress - Finavera Renewables Successfully Deploys and Commissions AquaBuOY 2.0 Wave Energy Converter. Includes the graph below which shows why the south coast of Australia is such a huge renewable energy resource waiting to be harnessed (as part of the Nullarbor solar project - as a side note, why has this link disappeared from Google too ?)