Stealth solar power plant startup Ausra has taken off the wraps, confirming that it has scored more than $40 million in funding from leading green tech investor Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures and marquee VC firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Green Wombat sat down with Ausra CEO Peter Le Ličvre and executive vice president John O’Donnell recently at the company’s Palo Alto offices to talk about their plans to jump into the increasingly competitive market for Big Solar.
Ausra, which relocated to Silicon Valley from Sydney last year, is beginning construction of a 6.5-megawatt demonstration power plant in Portugal and says its close to revealing agreements for massive-megawatt solar power stations with major U.S. utilities. "You’ll see announcements of those in the coming weeks," says Ausra executive vice president John O’Donnell, an American who helped hook the Australians up with Khosla and Kleiner Perkins’s Ray Lane. (In an upcoming story that will appear in the October issue of Business 2.0, Khosla, who sits on Austra’s board, told the magazine that Ausra has been negotiating with California utility PG&E (PCG).)
As solar power companies flock to California and the Southwest to win contracts with the big utilities, the name of the game is developing greenhouse gas-free technology that can deliver electricity at prices competitive with natural gas and other fossil fuels. Some companies, like San Francisco’s GreenVolts and Melbourne’s Solar Systems, are taking a high-tech approach, creating cutting edge technology such as concentrator photovoltaics that rely on sophisticated solar cells. Others, like Ausra, are putting twists on a tried-and-true technology like solar troughs to drive down costs.
"It’s this least cost mentality applied throughout," says Le Ličvre as Ausra co-founder and chairman David Mills meets with visitors from China down the hall. "All the materials
are really commodities. We’re not waiting for our industry to scale
before the cost comes down."
Mills, a noted solar scientist, conceived of Ausra’s compact linear fresnel reflector technology, or CLFR, at the University of Sydney in the 1990s. In traditional parabolic solar trough systems, curved rotating mirrors sit high off the ground and focus the run’s rays on tubes of synthetic oil suspended over the solar arrays. The hot oil creates steam which drives an electricty-generating turbine. Austra’s innovation is that it uses commodity flat mirrors that sit low to the ground. The refectors concentrate sunlight on water-filled pipes that hang over the mirrors. As the water is heated up to 545 degrees fahrenheit (285 celsius) the resulting steam drives a standard turbine. According to Ausra, CLFR dramatically lowers the cost of solar power production as the mirrors arrays use standard glass and require signficantly less steel than parabolic troughs, allowing them to be be pre-assembled in robotic factories at half the cost. The arrays also take up less ground space and because they sit near the ground are more resistance to wind damage and are easier to clean.
"The mindset that says cheap comes first, cost comes first and look to mass production technologies as a way of reducing cost has informed a lot of the fundamental development direction here," says O’Donnell. Though the efficiency of solar trough technology is relatively low compared to photovoltaics, he argues that all that matters is how cheaply a solar power plant can produce green electricity per kilowatt hour. Ausra also is working on technology to store solar energy to extend the operating times of its plants.
Adds Le Ličvre: "Parabolic trough power plants are well established globally and they’re great; they’re just too expensive. What we’ve done is just apply a different concentrator technology to basically doing the same thing. Unlike some of our competitors that are embarking on fairly advanced
technology designs that they have yet to prove will work, saturated
steam is pretty basic stuff."
While a newcomer to Silicon Valley, Ausra is well known in its native Australia, where the company operates as Solar Heat and Power. Co-founded in 2002 by Le Ličvre and Mills, Solar Heat and Power has built a prototype power plant in New South Wales that will begin generating electricity by year’s end, according to the company. But the Australian government’s tepid support for renewable energy in a coal-dominated country and a somewhat risk-adverse local venture capital community made scaling up a challenge. After a $A75 million government grant went to competitor Solar Systems last year, the company decamped for Silicon Valley. (Another Australian solar power company, EnviroMission, also has turned to the U.S. market.)
In an April interview with Australian television program Four Corners, Khosla predicted Ausra would be building a gigawatt’s worth of solar power plants within the year. Le Ličvre downplayed that expectation but said it was not unreasonable to think the company might have close to a gigawatt of signed contracts in the hopper in the near future.
Ausra faces competition from Israel solar trough company Solel, which has won a contract from PG&E to produce 553 megawatts of electricity, as well as from BrightSource Energy, founded by American-Israeli solar pioneer Arnold Goldman. BrightSource, which has developed a distributed power tower technology, is negotiating a 500-megawatt contract with PG&E. Stirling Energy Systems, meanwhile, has deals with Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) to produce up to 1.75 gigawatts of solar electricity.
Those plants are expected to be built in California’s Mojave Desert, where a looming obstacle is the lack of sufficient transmission lines to move all that green electricity to distant cities. "Because we have a substantialy lower-cost collector technology, we can place plants where you might not expect them as a way of addressing tranmsission problems," says O’Donnell. "We don’t have to be in the optium solar location to be in the money. We can place things where the transmission is available."
Like most of its competitors, Ausra still must prove that its technology and Henry Ford approach to large-scale solar will deliver green elecricity that can displace fossil fuels in the fight against global warming. But it’s clear that we’re reaching a tipping point where the technology, financial resources and demand for renewable energy will transform Big Solar from a decades-old desert mirage into a reality.
Green Wombat 
How much less efficient than photovoltaics? Which leads to the question of how much land do such power plants require? And how big a portion of the cost is land?
Same question here, what’s the efficiency of this system?
Also, the argument that it can be located closer to transmission lines because it is lower cost is spurious. Getting approval to build such a facility anywhere at all is a major hurdle. Closer to existing transmission lines and population centers is much more difficult and expensive.
I think I can somewhat answer and clarify my own question and comment. If their cost calculations are accurate, which they probably are, it seems glaringly obvious that these companies have the potential to completely revolutionize the entire electric utility market, and incredibly fast too. This is so awesome.
Efficiency of solar energy conversion as compared to other solar technologies is an interesting number. But it doesn’t matter a whole lot in determining whether it will succeed in the current market, because we don’t currently generate most of our electricity with solar photovoltaics anyway. The amount of land seems a lot compared to solar panels, but again, we’re not using solar panels currently.
What should it be compared against? What is the current land requirement of coal mining and the horrible practice of mountaintop removal? What are the land requirements of wind farms? What is the cost of the coal mining deaths that we hear about every week, and the health of it in general? What is the pollution cost of current electricity generation?
The question I really want to ask is, can they build it faster?? 🙂
What calculations?
I didn’t see a mention of capital cost to kWh produced per year.
I really don’t see any numbers mentioned here.
Why are they afraid to release numbers such as kWh produced per square meter of mirror (or land)?
Where’s the beef?
For fresh graduates or for employees who want to start their own businesses, one of the hardest things to do is to get the capital that they need to do so. This is because most of the traditional sources of loans or funding are apprehensive in providing funds for start-up businesses.is purpose.
I am not an expert on PV but I find the statement that parabolic troughs are less efficient than PV a little suspect and probably a misprint. I was always under the impression that solar troughs were approximately twice as efficient as PV. A quick look at the internet and I see they are building an 11 MW PV plant on 150 acres of land. A parabolic trough plant would produce at least twice that in the same amount of land here in the Mojave. What I think they were trying to say is that Ausra’s technology is less efficient than the present parabolic trough but cheaper to build and maintain.
I wish Ausra all the best and hope that it works out for them. I am a big fan of keeping things simple. Complicated things tend to work great in the lab but put them out in the environment for 30 years and often times they don’t hold up as well. Long term costs to maintain plants are a major factor in cost.
I am an operator and not an engineer but I do have some questions on how a plant would operate with saturated (wet) steam. Solar thermal plants by nature cycle quite a lot and wet steam will tend to beat the hell out of a turbine. According to Ausra’s website they have found a turbine that will work for this purpose. I also question putting plants in less than perfect solar areas. With PV if you have clouds you only lose production during the time the clouds are overhead. With solar thermal if you have clouds for very long you will knock the plant off-line. This causes loss of efficiency and added stress on the equipment. I guess if you had enough storage you could survive most clouds but it seems to me that, with the cost of any plant, you would want to put it in the absolutely best area you could.
Again I do hope it works out for Ausra. The more plants we get up, with different technologies, is better for everyone. After having a lull for so many years it is now starting to be an exciting time to be in the industry.
Very interesting discussion. After more reading on the subject, I also found supporting statements for Steve’s comment that solar thermal can actually be quite a bit more efficient than solar photovoltaics. This makes you wonder why we have been so focused on solar photovoltaics. However, it sounds like solar thermal plants require a very large scale to be cost-effective, and also a southwestern U.S. desert climate, sunny and dry. This all makes for a very interesting and diverse power grid in the future.
One reason that attention is paid to PV is that it is very scalable and distributable. My PG&E bill is ~17 cents a kwh. Of that, only 6 or 7 cents is attributable to wholesale power from power plants whether they be hydro, natural gas, geothermal, nuke or solar. The rest is transmission and distribution. With Photovoltaics, you can put the generation exactly where the load is – right on top of that office building or manufacturing plant. No need for new transmission infrastructure.
All of these technologies have there place, imho. It is indeed a great time to be in the business of making kilowatts from the sun. I know Ausra very well, and would love to discuss further but there are ethical and legal reasons why I should not.
I feel that photovoltaic will eventually be widely used but at present it still has more limitations than large scale solar thermal, for the average person. While PV may not require any new transmission lines, it does not completely eliminate the need for them either. Most all PV systems are grid tie. Those that are not are expensive and not exactly environmentally friendly with the large batteries. Your home or business still needs to have the same grid capacity for those days the sun does not shine or at night. Let’s face it most people don’t want to plunk down the money or deal with the hassle of their own solar system. They want it to be easy and cheap. I do feel that someday PV will be more efficient, cheaper and used on most all new homes in areas like the Mojave where I live.
One of the huge problems we are facing now is the power grid. It is simply overloaded here in California and we need to fix it. I used to work for PG&E building power lines before I started operating power plants. Our grid system is simply too small and not in very good shape. We need to invest a lot of money, to get it in shape, no matter what we decide to do.
Lets face the reason PV is so popular is it cheap. While less efficient than solar thermal, spending $20-50,000 for you house is a lot less expensive than building a power plant for hundreds of millions of dollars. While I am huge fan of solar thermal it will never be our only answer to all of our energy needs. Even with the heat storage systems that are now being developed, they will never be able to store enough heat for long periods of storms and clouds.
Steve,
While it is true that buildings need a grid connection, the point is that transmission infrastructure is already in place on existing buildings. Since you used to work on the transmission system, you probably know very well that when there is generation in a load pocket it creates the added benefit of increasing import capacity. So in a sense, installing PV on buildings in downtown areas can be considered an upgrade to the transmission system. When the sun is out, thermal constraints are at their highest on the transmission lines and it also coincides with peak demand periods. Combine this with the fact that NIMBY’s don’t want generation near the load, and you’ve got a pretty slick technology wit decades of operating experience and lots of room for technological improvement!
I definitely agree with you that there is the potential for great cost reductions in the arena of PV, whereas the cost reductions in CSP are likely going to be more incremental. (Of course everyone and their brother is crawling out of the woodwork right now saying they can do CSP for half of what it actually costs – lol) Having said that, the cost per watt of PV vs. CSP is still higher…but PV is better at small scale and requires far less maintenance. That is why it is such an appropriate technology for distributed power.
Finally, I completely agree with your point that solar is not the only answer. There is no one technology that will serve all of our energy needs. We also need to make strides first and foremost in conservation as well as in cleaning up fossil fuels, storing off-peak energy from wind, nuke and coal as well as sequestering carbon – algae holds a lot of promise for both this and biofuels.
I think we both agree that solar will play an important part in our future. I guess there is just a little different vision on how that should happen. I do agree that many of the new plants that have been announced with solar thermal will never get built. I have been around that power industry long enough to know there are a lot of “developers” out there who are little more than snake oil salesmen. (No offense to anyone on this board) They get the area all fired up with all the money and jobs they are going to bring and then nothing happens. Nine times out of ten they were just on a fishing expedition trying to get someone to bite. You see this in conventional, solar and even cows.
One thing I will disagree with you on is efficiency. I look at our solar thermal plants now and see there is a lot of room for improvement. Let’s face it not a whole lot of work has been done on this until the last few years. We are basically using 20 year old technology now. Most of the money has gone to PV. Right now suppliers are short and so are supplies but if we start building many of these plants I feel the price will eventually come down and efficiency will go up. I believe it will be a very short time until solar is cheaper than gas. I really don’t see California building anymore nuke or coal plants and I don’t see them damming up anymore rivers either. Solar thermal and wind are one of our few options other than natural gas that has a shot at making a difference anytime soon.
As far as electrical storage we really don’t have that many options. I have read about compressed air but not sure how efficient that is. We can convert the excess to hydrogen at 67%. One last option is pumped hydro storage. It claims to be 80% efficient. Not perfect but if we can get the price of electricity down then it might be an option. In the Mojave here we have a perfectly fine aqueduct right next to a perfectly fine mountain. It actually has one pumped storage plant already operating on it that I know of. Like you pointed out earlier, even if we double the cost of producing electricity we still don’t come even close to doubling the cost to the consumer.
Flat mirrirs don’t focus solar energy. Most of the sun rays from your system are being wasted. Parabolic mirrors are many times more efficient. Consider developing a low cost pabolic mirror to replace your flat pannel mirrirs and your system could be practical.
You need to hire a powar systems engineer to do a efficiency analysis before you spend big $ on a looser.
PS: KW output is not a good measure of power plant preformance. KW-hours per day is what counts.
I would like to know if the plant in California is going to be run and maintained by PG&E, or they just going to buy power from it. Could you please let me know. And could you give me a contact person we or phone number so we can talk . Thank you Corey Brown
PG&E is purchasing the electricity generated by the plant under a 20-year power purchase agreement. Ausra will build the plant but who ends up owning and operating it will depend on the financing Ausra obtains.
When does Ausra plan to go public with it’s stock?
With the focal point way up there, the Parabolic curve would be pretty slight. If there were (from whatever force) a very large build up of these plants, couldn’t big glass make slightly curved mirrors at, or slight more than, the cost of commodity goods mirror that is used here. And this is from pretty vague memory, but wasn’t 3M’s silverlux(?) made cheaper than glass mirror?. The whole works looks pretty well stripped down to it’s most elegant, and looks cheap to build, especially without government involvement. So barring a federal legislative braking mechanism(sigh), I am hopeful.
[…] come online. New technologies like BrightSource Energy’s “power tower,” Ausra’s compact linear fresnel reflector and Stirling Energy Systems’s solar dish may generate similar numbers of jobs. But then […]
[…] come online. New technologies like BrightSource Energy’s “power tower,” Ausra’s compact linear fresnel reflector and Stirling Energy Systems’s solar dish may generate similar numbers of jobs. But then […]