Silicon Valley’s solar boom continues with Ausra, a Palo Alto
startup backed by venture capitalist heavyweights Vinod Khosla and
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, filing an application to build a
177-megawatt solar power plant on California’s Central Coast.
Ausra’s lodging of its 1,000+ page "application for certification"
with the California Energy Commission last week is another sign the
company, which relocated to Silicon Valley from Sydney last year, is
about to sign a major deal with a California utility. Khosla has
previously said Ausra is negotiating with PG&E (PCG). In its
application, the company stated that the San Luis Obispo County
project, called the Carrizo Energy Solar Farm, would begin providing
greenhouse gas-free electricity to "a major California utility" by June
2010 under a 20-year power purchase agreement. If the Commission
licenses the project – at least a year-long process – construction
would begin in 2009. In September, Florida utility FPL (FPL) announced it would use Ausra’s technology for a planned 300-megawatt solar power plant.
While there’s no shortage of solar startups with big plans for Big
Solar, only three companies have actually taken the expensive and
time-consuming step of filing a construction application with the
California Energy Commission. (On Wednesday, Oakland, Calif.-based
solar company BrightSource Energy cleared a major regulatory hurdle
when the Commission signed off on its application for a 400-megawatt Mojave Desert power plant and began the licensing process.)
The Carrizo solar thermal power plant will deploy 195 long rows of flat mirrors to focus the sun’
s
rays on tubes of water suspended over the arrays. The superheated water
creates saturated steam that will drive two electricity-generating
turbines, to be supplied by either GE (GE) or Siemens (SI). While the
efficiency of Ausra’s compact linear fresnel reflector system is lower
than competing technologies, company executives claim they will able to
drive down the costing of producing solar electricity to make it
competitive with natural gas. (For more on Ausra, see Green Wombat’s
previous post.)
Unlike most solar power plants in the works for California, Ausra has
chosen not to locate its facility in the Mojave Desert, where solar
sites are sun-drenched but are often on government land and far from
transmission lines. Instead, the Carrizo project will be built on 640
acres of old ranch land on the Carrizo Plain, where Ausra will just
need to construct a 850-foot transmission line to connect to the power
grid.
"Ausra Inc.’s (Ausra) proved, proprietary technology significantly
reduces the cost of a solar thermal power plant and is thus capable of
significantly reducing global carbon emissions by generating low-carbon
electricity on a commercial scale at competitive prices," the company
stated in its application.
Green Wombat 
It’s clear to me that solar thermal will repace photovoltaic and wind and most wave technologies – they are uncontrollable and rather horrible methods of generating electricity, and very little at that, and very expensively, especially when one factors in their total inability to meet peak demand.
I disagree that solar thermal will replace photovoltaic. PV still has a place in the context of distributed generation. These solar thermal plants are typically best suited in places without electrical transmission or water, both of which are necessary! Thin film is where I’m looking to invest…