Gippsland Friends of Future Generations - Renewable Energy Today

Welcome to the Gippsland Friends of Future Generations weblog. GFFG supports alternative energy development and clean energy generation to help combat anthropogenic climate change. The geography of South Gippsland in Victoria, covering Yarram, Wilsons Promontory, Wonthaggi and Phillip Island, is suited to wind powered electricity generation - this weblog provides accurate, objective, up-to-date news items, information and opinions supporting renewable energy for a clean, sustainable future.

news.bbc.co.uk
20 November 2009

A major wave energy device sited off Orkney has been switched on by First Minister Alex Salmond. The move saw Aquamarine Power's 'Oyster' being connected to the national grid as part of sea trials. The wave-powered generator is a hinged flap connected to the sea-bed, with each wave moving the flap to drive a hydraulic piston. Mr Salmond said: "This is a key milestone for Scotland's marine renewables sector."

More work and investment is required in the coming years to make it commercially viable. A farm of 20 Oysters could provide energy to power 9,000 three-bedroom homes. The Stromness-based European Marine Energy Centre's managing director, Neil Kermode, said: "EMEC are delighted to see Oyster installed, running and on test." Mr Salmond also announced new funding of £975,000 to help deliver 'Oyster 2'.

www.smh.com.au
November 21, 2009

Australia's fledgling geothermal energy sector received a shot in the arm when two leading players were beneficiaries of the Federal Government's first round of Renewable Energy Demonstration Program (REDP) grants this month. South Australian geothermal operators GeoDynamics and Petratherm beat a field of 61 applicants to receive $153 million of the total $235 million in REDP funding. The REDP grants are the final piece of the funding jigsaw that GeoDynamics and Petratherm required before proceeding with commercial demonstration plants which will cost at least $200 million each.

This is welcome news for an industry which has been slow to deliver on its potential as a cost-effective, reliable and environmentally friendly source of base load power. The key challenge for Australia's geothermal industry is the technical difficulty of accessing rocks at a temperature in excess of 200 degrees, and located up to 5000 metres below the earth's surface.

Electricity generation requires drilling of two wells and fracturing of the rock separating the wells. Water is then pumped through the fracture, where it is super-heated by hot rocks and pushed up through the production well. Energy in the hot water and steam is harnessed to turn a generator turbine.

Of nine listed geothermal players, only GeoDynamics has reached ''proof of concept'' for its approach to electricity generation. But in a setback that cast a shadow over the sector earlier this year, after achieving this milestone at its Cooper Basin resource, the metal casing of a GeoDynamics' well cracked due to a chemical reaction in the steel and caused hot water and steam to rise to the surface under high pressure. The use of a different grade of steel should prevent a repeat of the problem, but GeoDynamics' progress has been set back about two years.

Look beyond the technical challenges, and geothermal's key appeal is its possible contribution to the Federal Government's mandated target of 20 per cent renewable energy by 2020. Identifying a need for about 35,000 GW hours (GWh) of new renewable energy generation to meet the target, analysts from RBS Morgans recently concluded that ''geothermal is the most likely and logical source of energy to fill [most of] the gap that wind cannot''.

GeoDynamics and Petratherm are well placed. GeoDynamics hopes to have a 25 MWs (MW) demonstration plant operating by December 2013, with a 500MW plant in operation in 2018. The Petratherm development plan will see a 30MW plant operating no later than 2015 as a precursor to a large scale (260MW to 1000MW) plant.

Petratherm and GeoDynamics have similar medium-term aspirations, but quirks of location and approach may make Petratherm the more exciting investment story. Neither companies' tenements are located close to transmission facilities and significant investment in transmission assets will be needed to deliver electricity into the national market.

Recent analysis released by the Australian Geothermal Energy Association suggests that the cost of transmission infrastructure will be about three times higher for GeoDynamics than Petratherm, due to its more remote location. This investment will be justified when GeoDynamics constructs its 500MW plant, but in the meantime the proposed 25MW plant will be largely for demonstration purposes, with the electricity generated used to power the small township of Innamincka but otherwise wasted.

In contrast, Petratherm's 30MW plant is located close to the Beverley uranium mine, an ideal customer for the commercial demonstration plant as at present the mine relies on expensive off-grid power. With a local customer and low operating costs, the 30MW plant could deliver pre-tax operating cashflows of about $30 million a year. Petratherm will hold a 34 per cent interest in this project, alongside joint venture partners Beach Petroleum and TRUEnergy.

But before proceeding with the 30MW plant, Petratherm must first prove the viability of its approach. It is looking to maximise project economics by drilling to shallower depths than its competitors, completing the heat exchange process in sedimentary rocks that sit above the granite heat source. Any investment in geothermal operators is at present speculative, due to technology and construction risk. Nevertheless, with funding risk now largely removed for GeoDynamics and Petratherm, it is surprising their share prices have barely moved since the REDP grants were announced.

At present pricing, GeoDynamics has an enterprise value of about $85 million, while Petratherm's enterprise value of just $25 million is at odds with the company's $70 million in undrawn grant funding that will effectively provide a free-carried 34 per cent interest in the proposed 30MW plant. Both companies are trading at a fraction of their longer-term valuation potential. However, the value differential, combined with Petratherm's opportunity to earn a solid return from its demonstration plant, suggest that Petratherm offers more near-term upside and is enough to attract a speculative buy rating from Carpathia.

www.theage.com.au
November 17, 2009

Keith Lovegrove is a bit like Frankenstein's inventor. He's built something so powerful he's a little unsure how to deal with the strength of his creation.

Dr Lovegrove, the leader of the Australian National University's solar thermal group, and his team have recently finished the latest version of their solar thermal dish, the biggest in the world. Now they just have to test it.

But the mirror-covered dish - which gathers the sun's radiation and focuses it to a small point - is capable of creating extreme heat. At this early stage, the scientists are trying to measure its power before they get around to installing a steam-making system that would harness the heat and make electricity.

The technology has been picked up by a small Canberra company Wizard Power, which hopes to commercialise it. The dish, an improved version of the one that has been running on the ANU campus for 12 years, has been completely re-engineered for mass production. It is four times bigger than any other such dish in the world.

So just how powerful is it? "What we've found is that it actually has a considerably higher performance than we dreamt of and indeed the absolute peak optical concentration is something like 12,000 times normal sunlight," says Dr Lovegrove. "And that is enough to essentially melt any known ceramic. It actually presents quite some difficulties for us to measure the radiation, so we've been reduced to using the full moon, to determine the shape of the focal region."

In other words, this thing, which looks like a satellite dish, is too powerful right now for testing with normal sun rays. So they are using the moon as it tracks across the night sky. And when it is on during the day they must make sure that power glancing off the mirrors doesn't set nearby trees alight. "We have to be continually taking care with surrounding trees and things like that," he says. "And indeed it can be quite uncomfortable when you walk around on the surface of the mirrors, as we do in the late afternoon, you can find the radiation making your pants very warm indeed."

Dr Lovegrove's vision and research includes using the solar thermal dish to produce heat to convert algae into liquid fuel - essentially a replacement for petrol and diesel. This technique, he said, could see Australia use its massive solar resource to export clean fuel to countries such as Japan. "It's dead easy to make renewable energy for Australia," he says. "But what we need to do is shift the Australian economy so that we get an equivalent income from an export to what coal gives us at the moment."

Wizard Power and the ANU technology are one of a handful of players in Australia's embryonic solar thermal industry. As I wrote on Saturday, the industry is on the cusp of big things and there's no shortage of solar energy in Australia. Dr Lovegrove says you could power the country on solar thermal dishes on land measuring 168 kilometres long and 168 kilometres wide. Recently a huge Spanish plant overcame one of the sector's biggest stumbling blocks when it proved it could store solar energy overnight.

But even though large parts of Australia are blessed with some of the world's best resources of solar - much of the land north of Canberra, but especially inland Queensland - the industry says it will struggle for a decade to compete with existing generators, even when the emissions trading scheme brings in a price on carbon. Under the scheme's current design, they say, a high enough carbon price will not kick in quick enough. The industry, although happy with the Federal Government's $1.5 billion Solar Flagships program (some of which will fund solar panel technology) wants generous tariffs such as those found in Spain.

Dr Lovegrove said that while coal-fired electricity costs about five cents a kW hour to make, a solar thermal plant in Australia right now would spend about 20 cents making each kW hour. That price will come down to nine or 10 cents in a decade, he said, but it still makes it hard to compete now, he said.

Besides the dish type, there are several different kinds of solar thermal technology in power plants. There are parabolic troughs, essentially curved mirrors in lines. The technology used by Ausra - the company founded by Australian scientist David Mills, who is now based in California - is called Linear Fresnel, and uses flat, tilted mirrors that reflect light back to a central point. There are also solar towers, with mirrors laid out around the tower.

Ausra, which has a plant in California, has kept its technology much cheaper than the dish approach. In September, Ausra and the Queensland Government announced plans to build a 23 MW solar thermal plant at the 750 MW Kogan Creek coal-fired power station near Chinchilla. Ausra also has a three MW prototype plant next to New South Wales' Liddell coal fired power stations.

Wizard Power's Artur Zawadski says the company has a proposal for an 80 MW plant in Whyalla, South Australia. It is also looking at demonstrating different storage techniques there. solar energy, however, is very expensive. Wizard's proposed plant has a price tag of $355 million.

In Victoria, the state is blessed solar resources in the north, particularly around Mildura, which is why solar plants have always been proposed for that area. Unfortunately, the bulk of Victoria's generation capacity is in the Latrobe Valley which is not particularly sunny. Unlike in Queensland, solar thermal plants in Victoria are unlikely to be built next to coal-fired plants, said Dr Lovegrove. "They are just not in a sunny place," he said.

uk.reuters.com
Nov 18, 2009

BEIJING, Nov 18 (Reuters) - China's installed solar energy capacity by the end of this year is expected to have more than doubled from a year earlier, a government researcher said on Wednesday, partly helped by state incentives. "New capacity may reach 150 MWs (MW) this year, more than three times the addition in 2008," Wang Sicheng, a senior researcher with Energy Research Institute under the National Development and Reform Commission, told a solar energy conference. China added around 40 MW of solar energy generation capacity in 2008 and total capacity reached some 140 MW by the end of last year, Wang said.

He said China's solar energy capacity expansion could even accelerate after the government sets benchmark on-grid tariffs for utility-scale solar energy plants and announces a new development target. "Eight projects with capacity of 10 MW each have started construction this year. There are still many out there waiting (for clear policies)." He said there were at least 44 solar energy projects with total capacity of nearly 13 GWs (GW) being planned and contracted by various power firms and developers. "The first phase of these projects would amount to 1.2 GW, already a formidable increase," Wang said.

The National Development and Reform Commission said in August it would set benchmark solar energy feed-in tariffs but it did not specify any timeframe for the announcement of the rates. It was also mulling to sharply raise China's 2020 solar energy capacity target, as part of a larger development plan for renewable energy expected to be unveiled before the year-end. Beijing announced unprecedented subsidy measures for building-mounted solar energy projects in March and for independent and utility-scale solar systems in July.

Last week, the Ministry of Finance announced that it identified 294 solar energy projects with total capacity of 642 MW that would enjoy subsidies of 50% to 70% of their investment cost. These projects, estimated to cost around 20 billion yuan ($2.93 billion) and to be built in two to three years, include 232 solar energy plants sponsored by major industrial and commercial firms, 27 independent solar energy plants in remote regions that have no power supply and 35 utility-scale plants.

China also identified 111 building-mounted solar energy projects with capacity of 91 MW in September that are qualified for another subsidy scheme. Under the plan, building-integrated photovoltaic projects (BIPV) will receive 20 yuan per Watt peak (Wp) of subsidy and building-attached photovoltaic projects (BAPV) get 15 yuan per Wp. ($1=6.826 Yuan)