Scott Bilby: This morning on Beyond Zero we're interviewing Arnold Goldman. Arnold Goldman is the Chairman and founder of BrightSource Energy which designs and builds large scale solar plants. He was also was the chairman & founder of Luz (loo-sh) International which designed, constructed, financed, and operated the world's nine largest Solar Electric Generating Systems (SEGS) in the Mojave Desert which, at the time, generated 90 percent of the world's solar electricity. Mr. Goldman also co-founded Electric Fuel Ltd, an electric battery/fuel-cell company listed today as Aerotech on the NASDAQ. Mr. Goldman is the recipient of two international awards for his contribution to solar energy development. He holds numerous patents for his inventions and innovations.

Hello Mr. Goldman.

Arnold Goldman: Hello, how are you?

Scott Bilby: We're very well thank you, and thank you for joining us in the studio.

Arnold Goldman: A pleasure.

Scott Bilby: Now could I ask you to describe the existing plants that are in the Mojave Desert, can you tell us about those and the new approach? How the new approach differs from the old?

Arnold Goldman: The plants in the Mojave Desert, there are 9 of them, were built and constructed by a company which I founded called Luz International Ltd. Luz International Ltd. was founded in 1980 and developed and designed solar power stations that were able to take solar energy, generate steam and turn turbines to produce electricity that would be sold to the power grid. In the case of the 9 plants, they were selling energy to Southern California Edison.

A team was developed that built technology which was economically competitive with what they called 'avoidance cost' which could produce energy and sell that energy to the electric grid at costs which were equivalent to what the electric companies would avoid in costs by buying electricity produced by our power stations.

We built the first of these power stations in 1984. It was a 15Mw power station and then subsequently built another 30Mw power station in 1985 and built 354 megawatts between 1984 and 1990. The power stations were operating, and all the power stations still operate today, throwing off in the order of $US100 million a year plus in revenue.

The power stations are powered principally by solar energy with the use to assure on-peak energy supply from the electric utilities. The companies have the energy and they need by some supplemental use of natural gas.

The stations are continuing to operate. They use what they call a solar trough technology system. The solar trough which we found to be competitive with avoidance cost of the day were technologies that would allow us to produce steam using this technology that tracked in one direction. It put solar light concentrated about 20 to 1 times the sun on to a heat pipe which circulated oil through the heat pipe and the oil would circulate in from the solar troughs to a big vat in metal pipes and in the vat the heat exchanger created steam and the stream drove the turbines.

That technology, in that time, allowed us to sell at competitive prices to the electric companies, allowed us to develop these plants which can then be sold to investor groups that would be getting acceptable returns on investment and we could earn acceptable profits on the sale of the projects.

Subsequent to the building of these plants, Luz closed it operations building new plants, the existing plants continued to run and the solar environment in the United States was not sympathetic for doing new projects. Neither was receiving very good fiscal environments from the government and the energy price was generally low.

Starting in the year 2002-2003, energy prices started going up. The Kyoto Agreement seemed to have very massive effects in Europe, which were reflected in the state of California. The United States didn't sign the Kyoto Agreement. California started to adopt policies that were sympathetic to the Kyoto Agreement and created an environment based on certain government supporting systems, higher energy prices and a renewable portfolio standard which required utilities in the state of California to buy a certain percentage of their energy from clean energy. They were starting to buy from wind, which was quite attractive, and create a demand for energy from solar which would be more time compatible with the delivery of electricity than the wind energy which was being delivered at night, which was low cost and available. They were looking, as wind energy became an increasing percentage of the grid, to see if they could buy solar energy which would be coming during the daytime hours when they consumed the peaker energy during the daytime summer.

With the increased look at demand in the state of California, which we're quite familiar with, and had very large requirements, the availability of some government incentives and the higher price of energy, decided to reassemble the key members of the staff to develop a new technology which would be capable of competing with what they call today Market Referent Price, or basically the fair market value judged by the Public Utilities Commission of the cost of electricity production by advanced combine cycle plants.

The combined cycle plants and the standard of efficiency is higher in the current energy regime than it was back in the 1980's. Then we decided that if we're going to be starting a new company that's going to be able to be a significant contributor to the problem of providing solar energy on large scale to California's south west, and we hope throughout the world, we would have to develop a technology that was competitive with the modern available costing systems and technology systems of the utilities of the current time and we decided to alter our technology from what we were doing in the 1980's to build something which we call power towers. So instead of concentrating light at maybe 20 to 1 sun concentration on pipes and having extensive piping systems, we would shine all the light from reasonably small, double-tracking heliostats to a boiler on the top of a tower and be able to have concentrations varying between 600 to 1 to 100 to 1, and make very, very high temperature, very, very high efficiency steam and run these systems at much higher efficiencies, much lower cost and be competitive in the current environment.

Scott Bilby: Ok, that nicely explains why you moved from the parabolic trough to the distributed power tower technology that you've created. Now, you say that the power tower technology generates more heat and is therefore more efficient. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Arnold Goldman: Yes. To a large extent these thermal systems work, the higher the efficiency of the heat going in, in these steam systems the higher the temperature and pressure of the steam, the more efficiently the pressure pushing the turbine with more and more pressure and energy it operates the turbine much more efficiently and therefore the conversion from the heat is more efficient. If the heat conversion is more efficient, say 10 or 20% more efficient, you need 10 or 20% less solar fuel, 10 or 20% less land, so the fields can be smaller so it's significantly less costly.

Further, by shining the light to the tower without having an intermediary fluid, you're basically bouncing photons directly on the tower and it doesn't have to have a costly piping infrastructure which you've got in the troughs, so it reduces the cost materially.

Thirdly, the heliostats are very simple constructions, they're simply one pipe in the ground and the gearing system that moves the mirrors in two directions pointing sunlight towards the tower and can be constructed with great ease as opposed having to deal with much heavier construction and ground work.

Scott Bilby: You say your mirrors track from side to side, and they track up and down and therefore obviously they're going to be better than troughs that just pivot on one axis, obviously there would be greater costs in setting up those mirrors to track along two axes though.

Arnold Goldman: No, actually it's surprising but it's quite to the contrary. What we (Bright Source Energy) used to do, and people are still doing today for the most part, when they're dealing with the troughs for many technical reasons they build very large surfaces. So you had a single-positioning system that was moving maybe a 100 metres of pipe, as long as a football field that was six metres in opening, those types of structures have very heavy wind loads and therefore they have to be very strong. So it might take 30 kg of steel typically per square metre of collecting surface. It takes a lot of cement and other construction elements to be able to fabricate and be able to support and construct the trough.

What we're doing is much smaller. It's a small mirror with relatively much smaller wind loads. We're using approximately one third the amount of steel, we're one half, even less than that, in terms of cement. So the materials required for construction are substantially less.

What had been not practical, it wouldn't have been practical in the 1980's when we were building the trough systems to use this kind of construction because the electronics and gearing systems would have been so expensive. But over this period of 20 years the cost of electronics and controls has dropped so much. We were basically the beneficiaries, not the contributors to that, but have taken the advanced technologies available for electronic controls and some of the advanced technologies that are available for small gearing systems and been able to incorporate those into the heliostats at surprisingly low cost and shedding the high cost of steel and construction work today.

Scott Bilby: And so I guess too, you'd also have less chance of having damage from strong winds and stuff like that too with those mirrors that are smaller and track on two axes?

Arnold Goldman: Well, I must say that both we and other people in the field have really learned and historically done really professional work on the engineering and the material strength, so they've been very reliable, both ours and we understand other peoples' systems, in terms of the mirrors. They've been very stable, but in order to get that stability took a lot of structure and construction materials.

Scott Bilby: Ok, now have you looked into your own particular storage technologies for the power your generating?

Arnold Goldman: We are in the process of investigating different storage technologies with the longer term intent to incorporate storage into our systems. Storage is a very complicated issue because there are so many different kinds of applications of storage in the world that in some locations, like Southern California Edison's locations, where they have very, very high air conditioning use, they have very, very valuable use of the electricity during certain key periods, short amounts of storage are very useful and so small amounts of storage for periods able to shift energy into those key moments when they need it are valuable.

In places like Spain where they have very, very high feed-in tariffs, levelised feed-in tariffs, different kinds of stores that can be stored for a long period of time are more applicable.

So we're in the process of evaluating where we think we want to put storage into products, and then designing storage systems that work for the environments that we plan on applying storage to.

Matthew Wright: Arnold, it's Matthew Wright here, in Australia we have a number of promising technologies also. They haven't got the background that you've got. But there's two slightly different approaches; one is by a Dr. David Mills of the company Ausra, and he's taken your parabolic technology, broken the parabola up into Fresnel collectors and reflecting the light to get his cost down, and another approach is from Solar Systems, it's very similar to your approach except that that company is concentrating solar photovoltaic, and at this stage I think they just dump the waste heat. Can you explain, it all comes down to cost, why your system is going to potentially achieve lower cost and a better outcome?

Arnold Goldman: So, I think it both comes to what you say is 'cost', it's both cost and its specific applications. And the specific configurations and designs that you'd be using would be geared to the specific markets that you're trying to be applicable for. The concentrated photovoltaic being done by Solar Systems, one would work quite well in small market applications where you may be dealing with modest, several megawatt-sized plants where our systems will only work in very large sizes. The photovoltaics could also be working, like the project that we understanding they are doing a 154 megawatt plant in Australia, on large scale also and there it's a matter of estimated cost. We have looked at concentrating photovoltaics and our estimate is the cost would be higher than solar thermal.

In addition, solar thermal provides the possibility of what we would call despatchable, or reliable, solar provisioning. So in locations in south west United States which we know best it looks like over time it may have very high value, where not doing it initially, to be providing a hybrid system which would allow the use of solar during the solar hours and the use of gas to power the power blocks during the non-solar period when it's most needed.

Most of the applications in the south western United States where we're concentrating would be using combined cycle gas station which are only being used 33-50% of the time, where other technologies are being used, coal, hydro or nuclear, are used for a lot of the base-load. But most of the growth is in this 33-50% of the time application and really we'd be using solar plants that were augmented by 10, 15% gas then we could be supplying the needs that the utilities have for being able to meet despatchable plants when the times they need it and during emergencies.

With photovoltaics, that isn't available so it would be difficult to be a real base solution, it would be a supplementary solution substituting for fuel.

So, we have a preference to start with, the solar thermal, where we respect very much the concentrating photovoltaics and its application and we think there's a place in this expanding market for both.

With respect to the David Mills/Ausra approach, it's a very efficient system for ground use and they get very good use of land space per solar collector, and there are applications where ground is very constrained.

In the south western desert, or in Australia where you able to supply from the mid-land deserts, land is quite available and then the advantage of the power tower system is that it works at much higher temperatures and efficiencies than the Fresnel lens systems, and thereby requires substantially less collective surface and has certain economic advantages in the power block.

Scott Bilby: Now, I just want to ask about the power plants that Pacific Gas and Electric have committed themselves to build; when is the first plant going in and how many power towers will that plant have?

Arnold Goldman: We're scheduled to have the first plant operation in 2011, and the exact configurations and finalised designs are still being determined.

Scott Bilby: OK. Can you tell us a little bit about the new power tower technology some of the water efficiency measures you've got there and how does water use compare to some of the other systems?

Arnold Goldman: Well, one of the very important decisions that we made as a company is to recognise that most of our clients are going to be working in the desert, and the biggest market we have potentially is supplying efficiently from desert states which is, clearly one of it's definitions is that it doesn't have much water.

So we've decided to optimise the system design on dry cooling which has some sacrifice in terms of system efficiency and some increase in capital cost, but being that our systems work at such high temperatures the degradation to efficiency due to dry cooling is marginal, whereas in lower temperature and lower operating systems like the trough and the Fresnel lens it's much more serious. So, we decided to take advantage of the higher temperature and higher efficiency both of the first plant, and our intended growth in temperature over time, to work it with dry cooling; and dry cooling takes about one tenth of the water requirements of conventional water-cooled plants.

Scott Bilby: Well, Arnold I think we're going to have to leave it there. We've actually run out of time here, but we're very pleased that you were able to join us to give us this interview from Israel and we'll be watching with interest to see how those plants go in the Mojave Desert and we wish you all the very, very best with that.

Arnold Goldman: I'm very pleased to have been with you and I thank you for giving me the time. Thank you.

Matthew Wright: And I hope to come to an opening some time in the next few years to the ground-breaking of one of your plants.

Arnold Goldman: That would be wonderful.

Scott Bilby: We've just been speaking to Arnold Goldman, all-round international heavy-weight in the field of utility scale solar electricity. You're listening to Beyond Zero, a climate change awareness radio show aired weekly on 3cr community radio. Beyond Zero is produced by the climate change campaign group, Beyond Zero Emissions. To find out more about us go to www.beyondzeroemissions.org So, from myself, and Matt here in the studio I'd like to say goodbye...

Matthew Wright: Goodbye.

Scott Bilby: ...and thank you for listening. Be sure to tune in again next week from 8.30am to 9am.