The Climate Spectator has a series of articles by Giles Parkinson on the announcement of the winners of the Australian Government’s “solar flagships" competition - Pride and prejudice.

Surely it wasn’t deliberate! But if the Labor government had wanted to further distinguish its clean energy policy from its predecessor's, then it would have got a fair bit of traction from the choices made in the first round of the $1.5 billion Solar Flagships program.

The two consortia chosen to lead Australia into the era of large-scale solar energy facilities both contain technologies or business plans that had been forced to emigrate under the Coalition government because of a lack of support and incentive.

Dr David Mills developed his unique solar thermal technology at the UNSW, but was forced to pack up and go to California to seek investment backing and government incentive. Ausra, the company he founded, was bought by the French government-owned nuclear energy giant, Areva, for around $200 million early last year. Now Areva has been chosen to “bring the technology home" and build a $1.2 billion, 250MW solar thermal hybrid plant near CS Energy’s Kogan Creek power station in Chinchilla in south west Queensland.

BP Solar closed Australia’s only solar PV manufacturing facilities in 2008, although that had more to do with internal decision-making than local policy. But its consortium partner, Australia’s Pacific Hydro, pushed all its renewable energy development overseas in the mid 2000s after Howard refused to extend the renewable energy target. Now the consortium, along with Spanish solar giant FRV, attracted to these shores for the first time by the Flagships process, has been chosen to build a $923 million, 150MW solar PV plant in Moree in NSW.

There is a more in-depth look at Areva’s winning solar thermal power project at Chinchilla (close to another Areva solar / gas hybrid project at Kogan Creek) - Areva pushes the solar hybrid solution.

The $1.2 billion Solar Dawn project selected for funding under the Solar Flagships program will combine solar thermal energy from the unique compact linear Fresnel reflector (CLFR) conceived in Australia with gas-fired power, in what could be a template for future solar developments.

The plant to be developed by French nuclear giant Areva, with help from Wind Prospect CWP and operated by CS Energy, will have a capacity of 250MW, but will be boosted by gas-fired power to ensure it can provide a “firm" dispatch to the grid when the sun is not shining, an important consideration for utility customers.

Under the terms of the flagships criteria, gas will be limited to 15 per cent of its annual capacity, but in practice it could provide significantly more. A nearby facility using the same solar thermal technology at CS Energy’s Kogan Creek plant is using solar as a 44MW “booster" to coal fired power, and it is not yet clear which system will prove to be the most efficient or cost effective.
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The Chinchilla plant will have thousands of mirrors spread over 200 hectares in a site that will total 500 hectares. It will be located adjacent to the Kogan Creek power station, and the Western Down substation. …

GP: Are you cheaper than the others, do you think?
AW: I think that there is definitely an element of lowest costs. Areva Solar’s compact linear fresnel reflector (CLFR) technology is based on a simple, durable design using commodity materials and it certainly has a significant level of local content through construction and supply that were no doubt attractive to the Government. Not just that, but the technology itself was pioneered here in Australia.

GP: Sure, by David Mills.
AW: And so it’s going to be a showcase internationally, not just for Areva, but also for Australian innovation in general .

GP: There has been some criticism when the shortlisted candidates were announced that linear fresnel was a bit like yesterday’s technology and that maybe the technology of the future was solar towers. How do you respond to that?
AW: I think that yesterday’s technology is probably the wrong description. Parabolic trough technology has been around for 25 years and I think that solar thermal is going in two separate directions: the first one is obviously the powered tower which is all about a fairly complex concentration on a single, small focal point. The other way that it’s going is the linear systems, like CLFR (compact linear fresnel reflector) which is what Areva has invested in, which is targeting the cost and performance trade off.
Now, the attractiveness of CLFR technology is that it’s direct steam generation, so it doesn’t require that balance of plant or heat exchanger equipment, it doesn’t have the environmental hazards of dealing with a thermal oil circuit and consequently it has a capital cost advantage. The Areva Solar technology is a very, very advanced technology that produces super heated steam. And I think that those comments about yesteryear technology do not understand the progress that Areva has made to technology.

GP: Indeed, we’ve written before that Areva has succeeded in a significant lift in temperature and I guess that improves its efficiency.
AW: That’s right. So, Areva’s technology is the only linear technology that generates super-heated steam and our temperatures are in excess of what is achievable by a parabolic trough plant. By producing super heated steam at a such a temperature and pressure, we increase the efficiency in a power generation application of using our technology, which improves the project economics.

GP: How much will this project cost?
AW: About $1.2 billion. It’s subject to finalisation at financial close which will occur before the end of the year, so that’s just an estimate as of today and once we go through the process over the next few months of bedding down all of the final agreements, then we’ll be able to come out with the final estimate.

GP: Ok. And you’re getting $464 million from the federal government and $75 million from Queensland. How much debt and equity will there be?
AW: The debt equity mix has yet to be finalised. We’re currently finalising our negotiations with the project financiers, but we do have over capacity in both debt and equity.
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GP: So, does the project depend on a good PPA then?
AW: Yes. The project will require a power purchase agreement in order to attract finance and we’re finalising arrangements over the next couple of months on an agreement that has been pursued right through the process.

GP: And how confident are you with that, because it’s been impossible for wind producers to get a PPA and their costs are much lower than yours?
AW: Well, you’ve got to understand that wind producers don’t have the same characteristics of dispatch as the Solar Dawn project. We’re able to offer a thermal capacity into the market place as a result of having a solar thermal and gas hybrid. Consequently, that’s very attractive to an energy retailer because it’s capacity that they can rely on within their portfolio.

GP: Will it also be attractive because you’ll be dispatching into peak times or at least shoulder times?
AW: That’s right. So, the dispatch profile of solar correlates extremely well with the demand in the system which is driven by air conditioning loads.

GP: Tell us about this solar-gas hybrid concept? Does that mean that you have to build an extra gas boiler to go with it? How much capacity of gas will you be building with it or will you be using facilities already at Kogan Creek?
AW: So, part of the design of the project includes the incorporation of gas boilers, which are there to be able to augment the supply from solar. So, where the turbine has headroom available which has not been fuelled by steam producers on the solar fuel, we’re able to use a supplementary fuel source which is gas to be able to get maximum capacity from the plant. So, it gives the off-taker the ability to rely on that capacity within their portfolio and ensures that they’re able to manage the risk in the energy market.

GP: How many megawatts of gas will you be putting in?
AW: The plant will be able to independently operate on solar, or it will be able to independently operate on gas. The 15 per cent restriction is from the guidelines under the Solar Flagships Program related to the annual energy that was dispatched from the plant. It’s not an instantaneous calculation. It’s a yearly calculation. We will build a pipeline in the local region to a number of gas sources and that pipeline will then supply the gas to the plant, so at day one we will have the capability to generate on gas-fired capacity if the sun is not shining.

There is also a look at the PV project in Victoria along with an interview with BP Solar - Big solar PV begins charge to parity.

Australia’s first large scale solar photovoltaic energy plant will start producing electricity from its Moree facility in 2013. If all goes to plan, and solar PV costs become competitive with wind as predicted in the next five years, some several dozen such projects will be likely be scattered across Australia by the end of the decade, adding a capacity of more than 4.5 gigawatts of emissions-free energy to the country’s electricity grid.

Construction by BP Solar and its consortium partners Pacific Hydro and Spain’s Fotowatio Renewable Ventures (FRV) will be done in stages, with about 30MW coming on line in 2013, and the rest by 2015. By the time it is complete the 150MW facility will be unlike anything seen in Australia to date.

The 645,000 panels will stretch over an area 3.4km long by 3km wide, or around 600 football stadiums. The next biggest installation in Australia is a 1.2MW array on a garage roof at the University of Queensland. And unlike rooftop panels, these arrays will be able to follow the sun, lifting their capacity factor to around 28 per cent (from about 15 per cent), and extending the duration of dispatchable energy earlier into the morning and later in the afternoon.

There is also an interview witrh 2 of the other companies involved in the solar flagships program - Q&A: FRV & Pacific Hydro.

Spanish solar giant Fotowatio Renewable Ventures (FRV) says it intends to build up its capacity in Australia after its consortium won the solar PV funding round from the Solar Flagships program.

FRV’s head of business development, Javier Huergo, says FRV – which will hold an equity stake of more than 50 per cent in the 150MW project at Moree – hopes more opportunities will emerge in Australia, which he sees as one of the most prospective in the world, along with the US and South Africa.

The Climate Spectator reports that recent speculation that Areva's push into solar thermal power would soon bear fruit has proved to be true, with the company announcing a 44MW CSP plant to supplement the existing coal fired plant at Kogan Creek in Queensland (OK - its not as good as a Spanish or Californian style large scale pure CSP plant with molten salt storage, but its a step forward) - Areva's sunshine test.

It’s been just over a year since French nuclear giant Areva bought out the aspiring solar thermal energy developer Ausra, but the purchase of the Californian-based company with the Australian-grown technology may be about to pay dividends.

On Wednesday, Areva announced it had confirmed financing details with the federal government and its joint venture partner CS Energy for a 44MW solar booster project at the Kogan Creek coal-fired power station on Queensland’s Darling Downs. The company hopes that it will be the first of a string of projects to be announced in Australia, the Middle East, India, Africa and the US over coming months that could lead to $1 billion of revenue within 3-5 years, and set Areva on its way to becoming a leading player in the global solar energy market. It’s pitching all its solar hopes on this one technology.

The Kogan Creek Solar Booster project gave Prime Minister Julia Gillard a wonderful new photo opportunity, and the government some hope that one of the many projects to which it has allotted grants may finally come to fruition. The $105 million project, which will begin construction in the next few months and be completed by 2013, will receive $32 million from the federal government’s renewable energy demonstration program, as well as $35 million from a Queensland government fund. CS Energy will contribute the rest.

The project was originally announced last year as a 23MW facility, but improvements in the final design and in the technology since it was first awarded the grant means that it will be able to run at a capacity of 44MW at peak solar times. That makes it the largest project of its type in the world, and the first commercial-scale operation for Areva Solar, which previously had an 8MW booster plant at the Liddell power station in NSW and a 5MW Kimberlina demonstration plant at Bakersfield, California, where much of its recent technology improvements have been achieved.

The technology, conceived by Dr David Mills at Sydney University, before he and his partners moved to California in the search of venture capital, is known as Compact Linear Fresnel (CLFR) which uses modular flat mirrors to focus the sun’s heat onto centralised receivers, where water flowing through a system of tubes is boiled, producing steam. The major achievements over the last 12-18 months has been upgrading the ability to deliver medium pressure, saturated steam to be able to provide high pressure, superheated steam (400°C), a breakthrough that will increase its range of applications, including to industrial ones and lower its costs.

Areva says booster projects such as that at Kogan Creek are particularly attractive because they reduce the levelised cost of electricity to 30 per cent below that of stand-alone solar thermal power plants, mostly because they take advantage of existing infrastructure (including grid connection) and they can be built in a year or less.

Areva says these sort of projects will allow the company to deploy rapidly in the 30MW-50MW project range, increase the customer’s comfort level with the technology and ability to deliver – a crucial step towards executing on a large scale basis. It sees plants on a scale of around 100MW-140MW would be an optimum size for this type of facility.

Still, the ability to deliver super-heated steam means that the technology can also operate on a stand-alone basis. It is still in the running in the government’s solar flagships contest, with a stand-alone 250MW facility that it proposes to develop with WindProspect, also in Queensland. It has also been involved with the Midwest Solar consortium in WA, although it is unclear where that project is heading at the moment.

Solar thermal has taken a back seat to solar PV in recent years, thanks to the generous government incentives that have caused a massive increase in scale in the PV industry, and huge reductions in costs, driven also by price pressure from Chinese manufacturers.

Areva believes its technology is the lowest CSP (concentrated solar power) offering on the market, although that remains to be seen, because not much of any solar thermal technology has been developed at scale. Certainly, it uses the least amount of land. It claims it generates up to three times more peak power per hectare of land than competing solar technologies. This high energy density translates into lower costs, a smaller environmental footprint, and an ability to produce a simple, modular system that is easily scaled.

“I think there is space for both solar PV and solar thermal,” says Tom Bartolomei, senior vice president at Areva Solar. “Everyone recognises the improvement in PV in cost scales – as we enhance our skill sets in building these things, that’s where we will get better value per megawatt hour. That will take time.” He says installation costs for booster systems will likely come in around $1,500 to $2,000 per kilowatt, while those for standalone units will be between $3,000-$4,000/kW.

The Clean Energy Council is mildly pleased with last night's budget announcements from the government - New renewable energy funding a step in the right direction.

Australia’s clean energy industry has welcomed the Rudd Government’s increased investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency in the 2010 Federal Budget, but says much work is still required.

The Federal Government will provide $652.5 million over four years to establish a Renewable Energy Future Fund as well as $1.8 billion for the Resource Exploration Refundable Tax Offset, under which technologies such as geothermal and wave will be eligible. ...

Mr Warren said it was important that government support recognized the different stages of clean technology development, which may require different types of financial support. “Until we have some clear carbon price, Australia’s climate strategy will need to focus on developing and deploying clean energy technologies, development of a comprehensive and effective energy efficiency strategy and more dynamic electricity networks that enable these new clean power stations to get their energy to market,” he said.

John at Crikey's "Rooted" blog is less enthusiastic (for offshore readers, "rooted" means "f*cked" in Australian) - Rooted budget.

This Budget is rooted. It puts and end to the pretense that the Rudd Government is serious about tackling environmental issues. It is a Budget dominated by short-term thinking and an almost complete abandonment of climate change as an issue of national importance.

With the recent backlflip on the CPRS, many were expecting some new, serious initiatives to fill the void. Instead, funding to environmental programmes has been cut, fossil fuel subsidies remain untouched, and the only sweetener is a new $652 Million renewable energy fund- another piecemeal and inadequate response. One suspects that it was only included so that Mr Swann could say the words “renewable energy” repeatedly in his budget speech.

As if to disguise their failure, the Budget announcement was followed with rapid fire announcements that had the word “solar” in them – to try to create illusion of climate action. However, these announcements were all just about existing programmes, including the shortlist for projects under the Solar Flagships Programme.

It is clear that Rudd and Swann just don’t get it. One-off injections of funding in to renewable energy projects or R&D are useful, but the transition of renewable energy from a small market player to the ubiquitous source of energy that it needs to become is going to require long term incentives and mechanisms to drive investment. A well designed feed-in-tarrif would do the job, as would well designed tax credits, combined of course with a carbon tax or properly designed ETS.

My co-editor Phil at TOD ANZ has a post on the funding announced for the "Solar Flagships" program, with Wizard Energy being one beneficiary - Renewable Energy Development Program Projects & Solar Flagships Shortlist.

The Australian Government has awarded $92 million to two large-scale solar energy demonstration projects

The two projects are:

- 23 megawatt solar boost to coal-fired turbines at Kogan Creek, near Chinchilla in western Queensland ($32 million), using Ausra (now Areva) Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector technology; and

- a 40 megawatt concentrated solar thermal demonstration plant at Whyalla, South Australia, using Australia's own "Big Dish" technology ($60 million).

Combined with investment from the successful applicants, the two projects will deliver about $320 million in solar energy investment in Australia and more than 60 megawatts equivalent of solar peak load generation capacity, within the next four years.

These projects will save almost 100,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.

Additional details of the projects follows:

• CS Energy Pty Ltd - $31.8 million

The CS Energy project at Kogan Creek in Queensland will demonstrate the Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) solar array technology developed in Australia by Ausra Pty Ltd. This technology is now being marketed world-wide by the Areva Group. The project will be attached to the existing Kogan Creek A Power Station to provide a 23 megawatt equivalent superheated steam solar boost to the coal-fired turbines. This will allow an increase in energy output as well as saving around 35,600 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. CS Energy is a Queensland Government-owned corporation.

• N.P. Power Pty Ltd (Whyalla Solar Oasis Consortium) - $60.0 million

The Whyalla Solar Oasis Consortium will demonstrate Wizard Power's ‘Big Dish’ concentrated solar thermal power generation technology developed at the Australian 2 National University in 1994. The 40 megawatt demonstration plant at Whyalla will utilise 300 ‘Big Dish’ solar thermal concentrators that will be built on site using Wizard Power Pty Ltd’s proprietary factory-in-the-field concept. The technology is easily scalable and a successful demonstration of the ‘Big Dish’ technology will open the way for further deployment of the technology, both within Australia and overseas. The project will generate power for about 9,500 average households and save about 60,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year. The Whyalla Solar Oasis Consortium consists of N.P. Power Pty Ltd, Sustainable Power Partners Pty Ltd and Wizard Power Pty Ltd.

AuSES welcomes this funding announcement, and congratulates the two projects selected. We look forward to seeing the emergence of large scale solar as a result of this announcement. ...


Solar Flagship Shortlist Announced

The Australian Government has announced eight projects that will be invited to participate in the second stage of assessment for Round One of the $1.5 billion Solar Flagships Program.

The shortlisted projects will share up to $15 million in feasibility funding going into the second stage of assessment:

Solar photovoltaic

o AGL Energy proposes a multi-site project using thin film cadmium telluride solar photovoltaic technology generating up to150MW at multiple sites across Australia including ACT, NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia;

o TRUenergy proposes a single site near Mildura, using thin film cadmium telluride solar photovoltaic technology to generate up to 180MW;

o Infigen Suntech’s crystalline silicon solar photovoltaic technology would be deployed at up to three sites in New South Wales or Victoria to generate up to 195MW; and

o BP Solar proposes a single axis tracking photovoltaic system to generate 150MW from plants constructed at several locations in New South Wales.

Solar thermal

o ACCIONA Energy Oceania proposes to generate 200MW using solar thermal parabolic trough technology at a single site in either Queensland or South Australia;

o Parsons Brinckerhoff proposes to construct a 150MW solar thermal parabolic trough power station at Kogan Creek in Queensland;

o Wind Prospect CWP proposes to use linear fresnel technology at Kogan Creek in Queensland to construct a 250MW power plant; and

o Transfield proposes to convert the Collinsville coal-fired power station in Queensland into a 150MW solar thermal linear fresnel power plant.

The Solar Flagships Council has also made recommendations relating to the siting of photovoltaic projects.

There is also some additional funding for the Australian Solar Institute.

The latest Australian Solar Institute (ASI) funding for solar energy has announced five projects will receive grants worth a total of $18.5 million.

The latest grants are:

• $5.0 million for a $24.1 million project run by the University of New South Wales in collaboration with Silex Solar and Suntech Power to improve the performance of screen printed solar PV cells;

• $2.25 million for a $5.4 million project run by BT Imaging Pty Ltd to improve the performance of photovoltaic manufacturing;

• $2.25 million for a $15.6 million project run by Sapphicon Semiconductor Pty Ltd to develop a high-efficiency solar module on a wafer based thin film;

• $4.0 million for a $9.0 million project run by CSIRO and the Australian National University to develop advanced solar thermal energy storage technologies; and

• $4.95 million for an Australian National University led $13.4 million applied research project in collaboration with industry partner, Transform Solar (an Origin Energy JV) to help develop the next generation of solar cells.

It was interesting to see that Areva (who I've speculated previously will give up on nuclear power and switch horses to solar power) is one of the companies involved in the CSP projects. Giles Parkinson has a column on this at the Business Spectator - The giant backing Australian solar.

The French nuclear giant Areva might have made one of the deals of the year when it snapped up Ausra, the solar thermal energy company founded by Australian researcher David Mills.

Areva bought a cash-strapped Ausra for an estimated $US200 million in February and plans to use the technology to lead a major push into the solar thermal energy market, which it wants to dominate in the same way as it does the global nuclear industry.

The purchase has paid early dividends in Australia, with its technology being chosen for a $32 million grant to build a 23MW solar-boosting project for the coal-fired Kogan Creek power station in Queensland, and short-listed for one of two projects to get substantial backing under the $1.5 billion solar flagships program.

When the idea of the Kogan Creek solar booster was first unveiled by the Bligh state government last year, it was said that it was not warmly embraced by the power station’s operators, CS Energy.

But a 'change of culture' at the largely coal-fired power utility has seen it become heavily involved in the development of solar projects. Perhaps it has seen the future. Apart from the solar booster plan with Areva, it is involved in two other projects that were yesterday short-listed in round one of the federal government’s $1.5 billion solar flagships project, announced on the same day as the government revealed its withdrawal from the FutureGen clean coal alliance.

CS Energy has teamed up with the European-based Wind Prospect CWP to use Ausra’s linear Fresnel technology to build a massive 250MW solar plant at Kogan Creek. It will be boosted by the use of gas from the huge coal seam methane reserves in the surrounding Surat Basin.

CS Energy is also involved in a consortium led by the US engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff that proposes to construct a 150MW solar thermal plant using parabolic trough technology at Kogan Creek.

Indeed, the Surat Basin may emerge as a major centre for solar energy developments because of its strong solar resources and its CSG reserves. The wind prospect consortium is believed to be toying with the idea of building a solar-boosted gas plant, although the economics of this and the solar flagships proposal will depend – to a large extent – on the existence of a carbon price.

Another hybrid proposal to make the short-list is Transfield’s plan to convert the Collinsville coal-fired power station in Townsville to a gas boosted solar plant, using linear fresnel technology developed by Novatec Biosol, a German-based company majority owned by Transfield.

As a sign of the government’s inherent conservatism on these matters, none of the big name US and Spanish proponents of the new generation solar tower technologies, such as BritghSource, e-Solar and Cobra, made the short-list.

The Solar Flagships program aims to build one large scale solar thermal plant and one large scale photovoltaic plant in round one, with a further two plants to be built in round 2.

In the solar thermal section, the other short-listed project proposed by Spanish group Acciona, for a yet-to-be decided location in either South Australia or Queensland, will use parabolic trough technology.

Joe Romm has an article at Forbes on Areva's interest in solar thermal power - Nuclear Giant Areva Predicts Solar Thermal Boom.

Earlier this year, French energy giant Areva bought U.S.-based Ausra in order “to become a world leader in concentrated solar thermal” power (CSP). And so the race is on for market share in “The Technology that will Save Humanity.”

CSP is the most scalable and affordable baseload (or, even better, load-following) low-carbon supply technology — when used with low-cost, high-efficiency thermal storage. CSP can also share its steam turbine with biomass, a strategy the Chinese are pursuing, or with natural gas.

The Oil Drum wonders if Areva is “losing faith in the oft-predicted but unrealised ‘nuclear renaissance’.” Certainly, Areva’s best-known product has become very expensive and the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns.

CSP, on the other hand, has just started down the experience curve and is poised to be one of the major winners in the low-carbon economy. Indeed, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek reports:

Areva SA of France predicts the global use of solar-thermal power will grow by about 30-fold this decade, a forecast that spurred the world’s largest maker of nuclear reactors to buy a California-based equipment maker.

The technology, which typically uses curved mirrors to focus sunlight to generate electricity, will be installed on plants with 20,000 megawatts of power potential by 2020, Anil Srivastava, Areva renewable energies executive vice president, said in an interview. That compares with about 625 megawatts today, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance data.

“It is a very attractive market,” Srivastava said. Paris- based Areva aims to become a world leader in solar thermal, he said, after agreeing yesterday to buy Ausra Inc., a Mountain View, California-based maker of sun-driven steam generators used by power plants.

Many big international companies are trying to become leaders in CSP:

Siemens AG, Europe’s largest engineering company, agreed last year to a $418 million purchase of Beit Shemesh, Israel- based Solel Solar Ltd. Abengoa SA, also an engineering company, is building 13 solar-thermal plants in Spain that will benefit from consumer subsidies for clean energy….

Bloomberg New Energy Finance has forecast the installed base to grow to as much as 34,000 megawatts worldwide by 2020, exceeding the estimate of the French atomic-reactor maker.

Whether 20 GW in 2020 or 34 GW, CSP is a very fast-growing market (see “World’s largest solar plant with thermal storage to be built in Arizona — total of 8500 MW of this core climate solution planned for 2014 in U.S. alone“). And ultimately that’s why Areva says it is jumping in:

The market for concentrated solar power plants is expected to grow substantially in the next decade with an average annual growth rate of 20% and should reach an estimated installed capacity of over 20 GW by 2020. With this acquisition, AREVA is poised to capture the leading position of this attractive and growing market.

REW reports that French energy company has purchased solar thermal power company Ausra - Areva To Acquire CSP Company Ausra . Is this a sign they see real future growth opportunities in solar and nuclear as (at best) a legacy business ?

Areva this week said that it will acquire 100% of Ausra, provider of large-scale concentrated solar power solutions. This acquisition launches Areva's new global solar energy business and the company said that it reflects Areva's strategic objective to be the world leader in concentrated solar power (CSP) and will further strengthen and diversify its renewables portfolio.

This acquisition is expected to close in the next few months, subject to customary regulatory approval. Ausra will continue to operate out of its existing Mountain View, California headquarters.

"Today is about making a strong company even stronger. With Areva, Ausra is joining forces with one of the world's global energy leaders. Combining Areva's financial and commercial strengths, and its energy expertise, with Ausra's proven technology and experienced management team will help position Areva for even greater success in the renewable and carbon-free energy industry," said Dr. Robert Fishman, Ausra's chairman and CEO.

Ausra's Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) solar steam generators are designed for existing fossil-fired plants, new standalone solar and solar/fossil hybrid power plants and for industrial process steam customers. Ausra is the first solar steam boiler manufacturer to be awarded the ASME 'S' Stamp the industry hallmark of acceptance and certification.

The market for concentrated solar power plants is expected to grow substantially in the next decade with an average annual growth rate of 20% and should reach an estimated installed capacity of over 20 GW by 2020. With this acquisition, Areva is planning to capture large market share in the emergin sector.

Late last year, Ausra was selected as the solar steam boiler supplier for the proposed 100-megawatt JOAN1 concentrated solar thermal power (CSP) project currently under development in Ma'an, Jordan.