Beyond Zero talks to Chris Huntington of Polymer based Solar Mirror supplier Sky Fuel

Beyond Zero talks to Chris Huntington, Senior Vice President Business Development at SkyFuel, developers of innovative solar thermal technology for large scale transition from coal and fossil fuels to a solar future.  Skyfuel uses reflectech polymer films developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

Beyond Zero taks to Christopher Huntington of Skyfuel

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Transcript

Matthew Wright:  Today we're talking solar thermal again with a company from the United States called Skyfuel.  And our special guest today is Christopher Huntington, the Vice President of Business Development at Skyfuel.  Good morning, Christopher, are you there?

Christopher Huntington:  Yes, I am Matthew, good morning to you.

Matthew Wright:  Good morning, we've seen a bit of information flying through from Skyfuel and you've got some roots with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratories and before we start, for listeners who've just joined us and aren't familiar, what is solar thermal technology and how is it different from what people usually think about when they think solar electric stuff on their roof?

Christopher Huntington:  Well, the difference is pretty straightforward.  Solar thermal, as the phrase indicates, is all about harnessing solar heat and the main systems that do this gather the heat, usually with a variety of reflectors that are very similar frankly to, at least in principle, to what maybe our mom's would have used a few decades to get a tan, you know you hold these reflectors up to your face.  Although now, we've got these curved reflectors that capture the heat, you use that captured heat to make steam and then drive the steam through turbines to generate electricity. This is of course capturing heat as opposed to what photovoltaic panels do, which is really to harness sunlight. There's one little feature to harnessing sunlight that people often don't understand and that is in a photovoltaic panel, you actually do not want to get it hot, you don't want to harness the heat because heat makes PV panels work a little less efficiently so solar thermal is capturing heat, PV or photovoltaic is capturing light.

Matthew Wright:  So it's kind of the approach - one doesn't want the heat and one does.  Now the advantage of going for heat is?

Christopher Huntington:  The big advantage that solar thermal has is that it is very, very easy and cost effective and reliable to store heat as energy.  In the large-scale solar thermal systems, and I would say, in particular the ones that are just being built now in Spain, are using great big tanks of molten salt, salt melted at about 220 C and it turns into a terrific, very stable hot, sticky syrup.  And storing heat in such a way and then sucking off that heat later on in the evening or on a cloudy day is a very, very effective way to store energy.  The one problem, the Achilles heal, if you will, of the photovoltaic system, is while they are ingenious at immediately creating electricity from sunlight, we haven't really on a global scale, we've not solved the electric battery problem in a satisfactory way.  Batteries are still very expensive, they don't cycle endlessly, they wear out and so a system that can store heat as oppose to electricity has an advantage at least for now.

Matthew Wright:  Ok, so we're talking about these very large fields of mirrors and what your technology is based on is a very established technology.  So in the Mojave Desert, I understand, there are very large mirror fields and they're quite proven?

Christopher Huntington: Yes, in Southern California in the Mojave Desert, as you mentioned, there are nine plants.  If you cobbled them all together they would add up to 364 MW, which may sound like a lot, but actually is smaller than your average sized coal plant, for instance.  Nonetheless, these are all collected together, several hundred of acres of parabolic trough - long, imagine a horse feeding trough, it's very, very large and a perfect parabolic shape and very reflective in the interior of the trough.  These troughs are oriented north-south and they track east to west and follow the sun during the day.  And in the middle of these troughs, the focal point of where the radiation comes into the trough is a pipe that carriers a heat transfer fluid.  And in the current parabolic trough system, that's an oil that can retain the heat and then once you've got the heat then you can make steam or you can divert it into energy storage, as I mentioned.  Parabolic trough systems are very popular in Spain and they really are, right now, the only proven utility-scale, in other words power plant-scale system, for generating electricity.

Matthew Wright:  Ok, and the innovators at Skyfuel have come up with some advancements on the technology.  So we've got this proven technology in the desert and it has some issues in that the costs are still needing to come in to be competitive with say other renewables like wind power and they use a lot of steel and glass.  So how's the Skyfuel approach different and why is Skyfuel going to be sort of a leader in the field?

Christopher Huntington:  Well, you're exactly right about the high costs.  These systems are very, very expensive to put in the ground.  Even though the fuel is free, the initial capital costs are very high.  So we approach everything we do from the standpoint of how can we maintain or improve the performance but make it less expensive.  And that really becomes an exercise in reverse engineering.  Rather than thinking about exotic materials or anything, we actually try to use very common, inexpensive materials.  Our systems are made of aluminum.  We are using wherever possible, we are using stock grades and gauges of aluminum so that when we order, for instance, the piping that makes of the tubular space frame for our troughs, this is standard gauge tubing.  Now, the big advancement that we've made, which we think will be applicable to just about any type of solar thermal design is that instead of using glass mirrors, which are very dependable, but they're very expensive, they're very fragile, they're very heavy and they present all kinds of transport and field construction problems, we have moved to basically what is a plastic mirror.  The main element in a mirror, in any mirror, that provides reflection is silver.  And instead of putting our silver under glass, we put our silver in a very sophisticated layer of plastic, a polymer, if you will.  This yields the actual material, which we developed with the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab, it ends up looking like a Mylar film, very thin and we process it with adhesive backing.  So we laminate it to thin sheets of aluminum that are then affixed to our trough structures so the big advancement we are bring to the industry is moving away from glass mirrors and we look forward to making this technology available even to some of our competitors.

Matthew Wright:  So in terms of the polymer stuff, does that take direct solar incidence, like solar light, because listeners may be worried that in using plastics they're likely to break down and not have the longevity?  Is there something special about this plastic?

Christopher Huntington:  Well, yes, durability and particularly with respect to durability to ultraviolet rays, which generally will shred plastic, I mean you're familiar with what adhesive plastic will do in the sunlight after really just a couple of weeks it starts to get very brittle and degrade.  A lot of, really close to 10 years of effort went into developing a series of coatings and layers that would be durable to the environment, a whole range of environments really.  Obviously, to bright desert sunlight but also to humidity and to varying temperatures it has to withstand.  We're very happy with how it's performed; we've had our material, we call it Reflectek, the brand name, we've had it in use at one of these plants at the Mojave Desert now for 6 years, almost 7 years running.  We've also done advance testing in the laboratories that shows that it's durable out to at least a dozen years so we're very happy with how it performs.  And even, frankly, if you had to replace it every six years and a day over say a 30-year life period of the plant, you'd still spend less money than if you put in glass mirrors to begin with.

Matthew Wright:  Yea, great. For listeners we're talking to Christopher Huntington, the Vice President of Business Development at Skyfuel Incorporated in the United States, a United States based supplier of great big solar thermal power plants.  And the time is now 8:44am and you're tuned into 3CR on 855am.  Now, this sky trough, another innovation I was reading, is that your actual troughs are 115 m long or 375 ft long and how does that compare to what's been going out conventionally in these plants?

Christopher Huntington:  One of the things you're able to achieve by getting away from glass, frankly, and this is one of the other benefits other than just to save money, is we can build a much bigger trough, a bigger, you would say in American's baseball, a bigger catcher's mitt, for getting solar rays and it doesn't cost 20% more to make the trough 20% bigger, just because once you've already achieved a certain size of it, to make it a little bit bigger is not going to cost you a whole lot more, but it does help you with performance.  And so our trough system is, frankly, twice as large as anything that's been built before.  The challenge that presents actually is you've got a very big apparatus out in the desert wind.  And so wind is really the thing that we have to do most of our engineering, sort of our defensive engineering, if you will.  But we are very confident.  We reckon that our stuff, we've tested it up to the equivalent of 84 mph winds so it's very, very robust in that regard.  But, being bigger is better, better economy of scale.  Overall our trough system is per unit area of mirror, is 25-30% less expensive than anything that's been built before, and some of that is cheap just by being bigger.

Matthew Wright:  Ok, so with the issue that some of the initial 20-year proven parabolic trough plants have had a number of mirror breakages.  What happens to your plant under similar conditions, do you have to keep replacing the mirrors or do they last longer?

Christopher Huntington:  Well let me be very clear, Skyfuel is a new company, albeit with our technology team is really made up of the real veterans in the industry, at least in the United States and we're going to be building our first plant of this new design in the coming year.  So we have not built a full size plant of our so-called Skytrough yet.  As I mentioned, we've got some prototypes up there and we've got some of our, if you will, Reflecteck plastic mirrors in use in some of the systems in the Mojave Desert, but we have not built a full-scale plant yet.  We look forward to doing that in 2009 and 2010.

Matthew Wright:  So I guess that's the big question then.  So you're expecting to start construction on the plant?  You've got permitting in place or underway?

Christopher Huntington:  Fair question.  Skyfuel is partnering with several major power industry developers in the United States.  We're in the process of fielding offers from developers in other countries as well.  We will be the designer, the architect and the technology provider - a little bit like the model in computers with Intel providing the chip, or the brain, for a PC but another company actually developing and marketing the entire computer package.  We decided fairly early on when we started Skyfuel that we didn't want to try to play the role of project developer.  There are companies out there in the United States, really in power markets all around the world, that are much better prepared, much more knowledgeable about how to develop an entire project.  We feel that what we do best is to come in and design the solar field and work with these developers in getting the most out of the technology.

Matthew Wright:  Ok and in Australia, we've actually have had a big contractor like that called WorleyParsons and they build power infrastructure and industrial plant for big miners like BHP and Rio Tinto and they came out with a plan they were talking about a huge number of parabolic trough plants in Australia.  What's the likelihood that we could see your technology in Australia in our parabolic trough plants?

Christopher Huntington:  Well we know WorleyParsons very well and we think very, very highly of them.  We've been meeting with and discussing projects like this with the WorleyParsons folks in the United States.  We are well aware of the opportunities in Australia.  I mean the fact is that Australia is already an established leader in solar thermal technology.  You know you have a company that started in Australia called Solar Heat Power that then, with Dr. David Mills, a tremendous genius in this field with solar thermal power and he came over with some of his mates and they started a company in the United States called Ausra based in California, which will be pursuing a different type of technology than Skyfuel but still solar thermal but just a different design.  I think that the fact is that Australia will be, we hope sooner rather than later, but will eventually be one of the great markets for solar thermal power for obvious reasons.  You've got tremendous solar resources down there and indeed you're motivated because being an island nation, certainly without all the fossil fuel that you could use and being forward thinking with regard to climate change, you'll be a leader.  Australia will definitely be a leader in solar thermal power.

Matthew Wright:  Yea, well we're trying to get to the point of forward thinking, but we'll be there soon.  We are pretty excited; I think the Australian community is starting to wake up to the opportunities that our amazing solar resource...I mean this is a country that is described as a sun-burnt country and so sun-burnt country and solar thermal go well together.

Christopher Huntington:  Yea, Matthew, it may end up being the greatest strength of solar thermal is in water desalination.  What solar thermal does better than anything of course is to create a lot of heat and you can use that heat through a process to make electricity or you can use that heat directly to evaporate water and the opportunity, and I know a little bit about the water issues in Australia and the drinking water issues, and I think that you guys will find that solar thermal will be a tremendous asset in creating a desalinated water for agriculture and even just for regular drinking.

Matthew Wright:  Yea, I think actually what's interesting, I don't know if you're aware of this, but some of the first solar thermal trough plants in the world were in Cairo in Egypt and they were pumping water in the deserts there back in 1912.

Christopher Huntington:  Yea, you know in the solar thermal industry, which is a pretty small little grapevine of passionate nutballs, yea the classic pictures of the Egyptian troughs, everybody's got them on their screen saver.

Matthew Wright:  Yea, they're amazing because we speak to the politicians and they say to us "ah, that stuff that's not proven" and we say, "well you only have to go prior World War I to find an operating commercial solar trough plant"!

Christopher Huntington:  Well the amazing, one of the things that attracted me to solar thermal is the simplicity of it.  It really is so logical and so sensible.  I mean anybody that's spent any time out in the high heat of the desert knows that there is an amazing amount of power that is just landing on the surface of the Earth in a form of solar radiation and harnessing that is just a goldmine.  We have to make an effort to make the harnessing of that power as inexpensive as possible and that's going to take us being as clever as we can with the materials that we have at hand.  But it's there, it's proven, it's worked for 100 years, it's only going to get better.  I just hope that collectively around the world, you know as you said about being forward thinking, that we move quickly enough to make a difference, because as all of your listeners will know, the use of coal around the world, but particularly in the United States and China and other big economies is a huge problem and it's going to be very difficult to get ourselves off the coal habit.  And I go back and forth between thinking we can do it to really being worried about it, at least here in the United States and particularly in China.

Matthew Wright:  Yea, there are some encouraging signs, you've had Barack Obama, I mean they probably need to commit 10x this but he's talking about $150 billion over 10 years for a green jobs revolution and I'm assuming that that's going to target your industry and of course the solar tax, 8-year tax concession that's been offered.

Christopher Huntington: Yep, that'll help and by the way I like your implied optimism there about Barack Obama, I mean we still have an election to get through in a week's time but it looks good that he will be elected.  I think that there's an opportunity for him given everything that's going on in the financial markets and with the economy here in the United States and the global economy, there's an opportunity for him to really lay down the gauntlet and make a pledge to do the right thing with regard to clean energy jobs, job creation, but really what clean energy can do for us not only economically but also of course environmentally.  It's going to be, I get back to the coal thing now and this is just speaking for the United States, coal in the United States still produces more than 50% of the electricity.  It is a huge economic issue in big regions of the United States. The coal interests are, you probably have or heard the expression "clean coal", which is the ultimate oxymoron...

Matthew Wright:  Absolutely...it's dirty...

Christopher Huntington: ...you cannot clean up coal and yea, it's dirty, it's pure carbon basically.  And the idea that you can capture the carbon and stick is back in the ground has never been proven on a commercial scale.  Even if you could do it, it will be tremendously expensive, which as far as I'm concerned as a solar power advocate is a good thing that's it expensive because that will drive people to look at other options, but clean coal is a very dangerous phrase because it puts a lot of people back to sleep thinking that we've solved the problem and we have not at all.

Matthew Wright:  And I totally endorse what you're saying there.  We're going to have to leave it because we're running out of time.  And I thank you very much for joining us, Chris, it's been great and we hope to get you back on the show again sometime soon.

Christopher Huntington:  Matthew, it's a great honor, thank you very much for having me on and I hope next time I can join you in the studio there, I'd look forward to coming over.

Matthew Wright:  That'd be great; we'll see you here.  That was Christopher Huntington, the Vice President of Business Development of Skyfuel and a real solar advocate.

Transcript by Nicole Caruso Originally aired 31 Oct 2008