Green Wombat

photos: green wombat
When reporting the Big Solar story for the June issue of Business 2.0, I had the opportunity to visit solar power company Solar Systems in Melbourne, Australia, as well as one of its power plants in the Australian Outback. Founder John Lasich started the company in 1990 after spending years working on solar technology in his backyard. Lasich, 52, began tinkering with solar cells as a university student in 1975. "I had to do a project for physics," he recalls. "There was a list of really boring things to do. I happened to have read a bit about solar cells and I asked my supervisor if I could do it on that and it just so happened that he had an interest in that as well. I couldn’t wait to get these cells. I put them out in the sun and got a meter and tested them and I got milliwatts. I thought, ‘shit, as elegant as this is, this is not going to do anything.’ " So Lasich got an art student to craft a dish on his pottery wheel. "I put in the cell and bingo, it was like a hundred times the power. And I thought I’m making something here. And 10 seconds later the cell melted and fell to pieces because I cooked it. And I guess ever since then I’ve been working on the business of making cells survive and work extremely well in the environment."

Lasich’s rudimentary dish had concentrated the sun’s rays on the solar cell, boosting its output. After university, he joined a solar company that went broke when oil prices fell in the early 1980s. Lasich then went to work in the petrochemical industry for the next 10 years. But he continued to perfect his concentrator dish technology. He pulls out a faded Polaroid of his younger, long-haired self working on a homemade solar dish in his backyard in the 1980s. In 1990 he took the plunge and founded Solar Systems to build concentrator photovoltaic dishes. Solar Systems headquarters off a lane in a Melbourne suburb is something of a solar museum, with various generations of the company’s technology sitting on shelves and scattered about Lasich’s office. That solar dish that he and his wife built in their backyard more than a decade and a half ago sits outside the company’s clean room and is still used to test solar receivers.

Solar Systems has built three small-scale power plants in remote Aboriginal communities in Australia’s Northern Territory. The Hermannsburg plant (photos above) features eight giant dishes that focus the sun on receivers containing solar cells. Electricity is produced instantly with virtually no moving parts, other than the dishes that track the sun throughout the day. Seven of the dishes feature solar cells from SunPower. The eighth dish, however, sports new high-efficiency multijunction cells developed by Boeing’s Spectrolab subsidiary and Solar Systems.  Inside the control  room, a flat-screen monitor shows a more than 50 percent improvement in efficiency for that dish.

Back in Melbourne, Lasich holds up a cube of midnight-blue glass. It’s a Spectrolab solar module that is the heart of Solar Systems’s next big project: a 154-megawatt heliostat concentrator solar power station to be built in southeast Australia. Last year the company won $95 million in Australian government funding toward the plant. Instead of using expensive and technologically complex solar dishes, Solar Systems will deploy fields of relatively cheap sun-tracking mirrors called heliostats that will focus the sun on towers that hold receivers containing the world’s most efficient solar cells. And when even more efficient cells are developed, Solar Systems can just swap out the old ones. The company plans to produce 20,000 heliostats on a robotic assembly line. "They’ll be rolled out over about a three-year period," Lasich says. "So we have a proving up period of about three and a half years to demonstrate this format and then the process is to just repeat that."

Lasich expects the plant to produce electricity for about 10 cents a kilowatt hour, which would make it nearly competitive with coal, especially if greenhouse gas emission limits are imposed. "It’s not a number we picked because it sounds good. We did a thousand-line costing of the thing," he says. "The beautiful thing about a concentrator system is that the module puts out 1,500 times more power than a normal solar panel," he says. "What it means is the rest of the system – 95 percent of it is glass, steel and concrete, really common stuff. So the manufacturing and building techniques are stock standard."

"We’re in this for the triple bottom line, if you like," he adds. "We’re trying to make money for our shareholders and we’re trying to be socially responsible while we do it, and of course we’re trying to improve the environment while we’re at it."