The Australian is reporting this morning that US based BrightSource Energy has its sights set on building a large-scale solar thermal plant in Australia; to be partly funded by the Australian Government’s Solar Flagships program.
BrightSource is no stranger to big ticket solar projects. The company, whose backers include Google, BP and Morgan Stanley, is actively developing more than 4GW of solar power projects in the USA’s southwest, enough to power 1.4 million homes.
BrightSource states it now has more than 2.6 gigawatts of power under contract in the USA, including the two largest solar power agreements ever – a 1.3 gigawatt deal inked with Southern California Edison in 2009 and the same with Pacific Gas & Electric Company.
In February this year, the company announced that the U.S. Department of Energy had committed to provide $USD1.37 billion in loan guarantees to support the financing of BrightSource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric System.
According to The Australian, Brightsource plans to build a facility in Australia along the same lines as the Ivanpah Solar Electric System; using solar thermal tower technology where sunlight is reflected by thousands of small mirrors onto a boiler filled with water on top of a tower. The focused sunlight raises the temperature of the water inside the boiler and creates high temperature steam, which is then piped to a conventional turbine which generates electricity.
The $1.5 billion Solar Flagships program is part of the Australian Government’s $4.5 billion Clean Energy Initiative (CEI), announced in the May 2009 Budget. The primary goal of the Solar Flagships program is to provide support for the implementation of grid-connected large scale solar farms and to operate within a competitive electricity market. The Government aims to establish 1,000 megawatts of solar power generation capacity through the program.
