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Hopes that Australia can support a manufacturing industry based on solar technology developed in this country have been rekindled with the opening of a 500-kilowatt concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) solar power station in Victoria in late March.

The pilot plant at Bridgewater in central Victoria has been built by Australia's largest listed cleantech company, Silex Systems, which bought the technology from Solar Systems two years ago following the collapse in 2009 of that company. Silex has been able to inject money into research that was needed to refine the technology, and which Solar Systems could not afford after a fundraising attempt in the US failed and its backers, including TRUenergy, pulled their funding.

The pilot plant is a precursor to a 2-megawatt demonstration plant that is already being constructed in Mildura, which will then lead to a 102MW plant that has funding from both the federal and state governments.

Silex says it is confident that the technology will deliver, and be able to produce energy cheaper than rival utility scale PV systems. To do that, chief executive Michael Goldsworthy says, means delivering energy at less than $150/MWh. He doesn't say where the costs are at now but suggests they are in the "broad range" of current PV technology costs (from $150/MWh to $220/MWh).

The company has already established a manufacturing plant in Abbottsford, Melbourne, that has a production capacity of 100MW a year.

This has been designed so it can ramp up to 500MW a year should the demand be there.

It would be the first large-scale domestic production of Australian developed solar technology, as most other inventors -- from David Mills's Ausra, through numerous developments emerging out of the University of NSW's school of photovoltaic and renewable energy engineering and to DyeSol's solar dye technology -- have had to seek funding and manufacturing opportunities overseas.

Australia has only two other solar manufacturing plants. One is the Silex PV module plant in Homebush, Sydney, which is in the process of reopening after closing last year. However, it now only assembles modules, and sources cells from China after the closure of the cell facility last year. A new manufacturing plant, also modules only, has been opened in South Australia by Tando Solar.

Perhaps this is just the impetus that Australia needs.

Happy reading

Andy Skillen
Publishing Director

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