Patrick Hearps, Technical director for Beyond Zero Emissions, speaks about Australia’s solar flagships program

Beyond Zero Emission’s Mathew Wright and Scott Bilby speak to Patrick Hearps, technical director for Beyond Zero Emissions, about Australia’s solar flagships program, discussing renewable technologies and how renewable energy is delt with in Australian politics today.

Beyond Zero speaks in studio to Patrick Hearps

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Transcript

Scott Bilby.  Today we’re speaking with Patrick Hearps.  He’s the technical director at Beyond Zero Emissions.  Hello Patrick.

Patrick Hearps.  Hello.  Thanks for having me.

Scott Bilby.  Now today we’re going to be talking about the Solar Flagships program in Australia.  So you’re the technical director at Beyond Zero Emissions.  Just tell us very quickly about that, and then we’ll get into the Solar Flagships program.

Patrick Hearps.  Well for the past number of months I’ve been overseeing the Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy project, which we’ve previously talked about on this show.  So that’s a plan to look at how we can completely supply all our energy needs from commercially available renewable energy, so that’s just a project where we’ve specified, agreed on a system for Australia that would meet 40% of our electricity from wind and 60% from solar-thermal and replace all fossil fuels.  So it’s a broad high-level look at Australia’s energy system and how we can meet our demands.  But the most important thing about that is that we use commercially available – now – technology like solar-thermal storage, meaning we can start right now.  There are already companies out there who are building hundreds of megawatts, thousands of megawatts in solar-thermal around the world, over in Spain and the U.S.  We can bring those industries to Australia and get started straight away.

Matthew Wright.  In fact they’ve even got plans in with the Federal government, many of them, don’t they?

Patrick Hearps.  That’s correct.  So the Solar Flagships program is the Federal government’s scheme they’ve set up to provide funding to the first few solar projects – large scale solar projects – in Australia.  They received applications from many of the leading companies all over the world.  So I’ll just talk about what the Solar Flagships program is.  They’ve put up $1.5 billion.

Matthew Wright.  And ‘they’ being…?

Patrick Hearps.  Ah, the Federal government.  And that will go towards partial funding of large scale solar projects.  So it works like a 1:2 ratio, so the Federal government pays one part, $1 to every $2 that private investment pays.  And that helps to make the projects more economical.  Now that 1.5 billion is to be split between four projects; two of them will be large scale PV, and two of them large scale thermal.  Now in this first round of Solar Flagships that’s gone through they’re only going to allocate to two projects; one thermal, and one PV.  So it’s half of the money there.

Scott Bilby.  And so that one thermal project, are they looking at the newest technology – the solar-thermal power with molten salt storage, or not?

Patrick Hearps.  Unfortunately  not.  So as we understand it, for all the projects, PV and thermal, the government received 52 applications from large companies from all over the world; both local companies and some of the industry leaders.  And some of those were ones like, say, ACS Cobra and Abengoa, and other large companies that are already building and operating large scale solar-thermal overseas.  But unfortunately due to the way they had it set up, due to the funding arrangements and preferring older technologies…

Matthew Wright.  I’d say 1980’s, wouldn’t you?

Patrick Hearps.  1980’s technologies… they basically sort of excluded molten salt power towers from the program.   

Scott Bilby.  That seems a bit of a shame.  And is there any factor in there that, say, perhaps the Federal government was trying to favour Australian technology or something, or what?

Patrick Hearps.  Well… there wouldn’t be a great deal of benefit to favouring Australian technology because in the solar-thermal space unfortunately Australia is unfortunately lagging behind the rest of the world.  However what we really need to see with the Solar Flagships is not only bringing large scale solar-thermal to Australia but bringing solar-thermal with storage.  That’s a key thing we need to see with Solar Flagships because that needs to show, to demonstrate, that as they’re already operating overseas we can bring this technology to Australia, which will operate and provide power when the sun’s not shining.  So not just solar-thermal on sun, but solar-thermal with the molten salt storage.  Now the government did receive applications to build those but they’ve refused them and gone with lower quality technology.

Matthew Wright.  With rooftop photovoltaic, you know, the kind of domestic solar panels, they’re on sun aren’t they?  They’re like when the sun’s out they’re working, the sun’s gone, they’re off.  So in terms of solar-thermal technology, what’s the point of doing solar-thermal technology given that PV has come down so much in cost recently, if you can’t do solar at night?

Patrick Hearps.  Well that’s completely correct.  The key trump card that solar-thermal has over solar PV is the economical storage option in molten salts.  So it’s actually a bit of a shame that the Solar Flagships is going for large scale centralized PV in the first place, because the thing about PV is that when you put it on a rooftop, a PV panel, it competes directly with the consumer electricity price something up in the range of 17-20 cents per kWh.

Matthew Wright.  So the price at your meter?

Patrick Hearps.  That’s correct.  So that’s a lot easier to compete with, but when you put in a large scale centralized PV system, so several hundred megawatts in one location, and it has to go to the transmission and distribution network it then has to compete with the wholesale fossil electricity price of five or less cents per kWh.  So it makes it a lot harder to compete and given that you don’t have economical storage for PV, aside from things like expansive batteries, it makes much more sense to go with the rooftop option for PV and save the large scale installations for solar-thermal where you can put storage on them and directly compete with your base load fossil fuels.

Matthew Wright.  So solar-thermal plant is almost like, it’s got its own sort of hydro-dam built in really, in terms of that thermal storage bank.

Patrick Hearps.  That’s correct.  The beauty of the solar-thermal storage, that’s the hot molten salt where you’re transferring hot liquid salt from a cold tank and you’re heating up to a hot tank and then drawing energy back out to generate steam, drive a turbine.  Though they’ve actually designed the plants overseas so they can start up and ramp down very quickly. So they can actually match the variability of other renewables quite well.  So it’s power when you want it, and you don’t have to have it when you don’t.

Scott Bilby.  Okay that’s awesome.  So we know all about the technology we should be using.  We’ve been talking about it here for a long time.  We’ve been talking to all the specialists around the world.  As you mentioned, they’re being built right now.  But let’s get back to the Solar Flagships program – do we know what they’ve actually chosen for this first thermal plant?  And, well, fill us in…

Patrick Hearps.  Out of the projects?  Out of all the 50 applications they’ve short-listed it down to four projects for PV and four projects for solar-thermal.  Now it looks at the moment like two of those thermal projects are going to be trough plants, so that’s the more mature 1980’s style solar-thermal that we’ve already seen in operation overseas.

Scott Bilby.  But to be fair, the government might want to go with a trough plant because it’s an established technology.

Patrick Hearps.  That’s correct.  However, what’s really important is where you put a trough plant, and the solar resource you get at these different locations.  So that’s the beauty of, say, a tower plant that has a field of flat mirrors that track both the elevation of the sun and track the sun across the course of the day, is that when the sun is low on the horizon you can tilt the mirror to face the sun and collect a lot more energy per metre squared of mirror than you can with a trough plant.  So that’s really important when you put these plants at southern latitudes.

Matthew Wright.  So that tracking the elevation of the sun, that’s something that’s important in winter because the sun is sitting low on the horizon in winter, right?

Patrick Hearps.  That’s correct, and you can receive perhaps double or three times the amount of power in winter from a plant that tracks the sun compared to a plant that doesn’t track the sun, so that’s why a tower plant does have a greater advantage.

Scott Bilby.  So that seems strange to me then, if they are going with a trough plant, that they would plan to put it in a southern latitude.  Surely they’d want to get it in the hottest, harshest sort of dessert environment they could in Australia?  Because we’ve got plenty of it.

Matthew Wright.  Well I think there’s some proposals for Mildura, and for Queensland.  So, I mean the Mildura one for troughs, anything that doesn’t track the elevation is a bit of a sorry story I’d say, wouldn’t it?

Patrick Hearps.  Well that’s correct.  I mean the interesting thing to note about Mildura is when you look at where they’re building solar-thermal overseas in Spain, and where they’re proposing in Southern California in the U.S., the latitude of those sites they’re building in Spain is equivalent of I think Kilmore in Victoria, southern latitude.  So they’re actually a decently long way from the equator and right now the solar-thermal plants they have operating right now do suffer that winter time decline.  So if you put them in Mildura in Australia you’d be putting them in just as good, well just as good or just a bad, a location, however you want to call it, as they’re building them in Spain.  But of course, the further north you go from there the better and the better the solar resource gets.  So if you’re going to build trough plants it would make sense to put them in the more northern locations in Australia.

Scott Bilby.  And the Mildura are more of a southern latitude option.  Is that because of proximity to the grid?

Patrick Hearps.  Um, not necessarily.  I mean depending on where you put them in places in Queensland you’ll find high voltage transmission lines up there.

Matthew Wright.  Could be the politics of actually getting solar in Victoria.  So that’s not to say, if we want to move the grid, and this has been shown in the report that said - the 2020 Stationary Energy Plan, which is what Patrick is working on and will be released at the Melbourne Energy Institute on the 14th of July - this is what they’re actually saying, is that if you want to power the whole country on solar and wind you will be using Mildura.  But if you want to get those first plants out and get maximum bang for your buck well while you’re still riding the cost reduction trajectory (and the cost reduction trajectory’s how you build some plants and get the price coming down through scale, through building plant after plant after plant), you know, you might as well chose locations in places like Queensland, in somewhere like Dubbo … so that you’re getting maximum bang for your buck.  And it doesn’t seem like the government when it’s picking winners, or you could say picking losers, has chosen some of the best options.  Now my question Patrick is, two of the other technologies, I mean the government, some people said well ok they chose these technologies, and Scott just mentioned troughs have been around since the 80’s, and so it’s a conservative option, but I don’t believe that the linear Fresnel technologies, the other two they’ve chosen, have got any sort of history like the troughs do or like towers.  They’re just not rating in that history.  Is that the case?

Patrick Hearps.  Well that’s interesting.  If you look to the Solar Flagships guidelines there were some parameters in there.  You know, you had to have shown a large scale demonstration, I think the equivalent of 30MW in operation for a year, and as far as we know the linear Fresnel technology doesn’t really have that history.  There have been a few demonstration plants around the world and that’s about it.  So linear Fresnel is where you use long flat mirrors all in a row and they sort of approximate the shape of a parabola.  So they’re a bit like a parabolic trough, but they’re not as efficient and they suffer the same projection losses.  But they also suffer things like getting low temperatures, and also as far as we know there isn’t actually an operational example of a linear Fresnel plant that’s actually operating connected to a turbine anywhere in the world.  So, I mean there are some plants that are just constructed and they’re just generating steam for industrial purposes, or in the case of the Liddell power station in New South Wales there’s a very small demonstration plant there that’s providing a little bit of extra steam to the coal plant, but actually linear Fresnel on its own is not a proven solar-thermal power generating technology.

Scott Bilby.  I really want to get back to the Solar Flagship program, when they’re actually going to break ground on this first project, ok, because is it pie in the sky nonsense, or is it actually going to really happen?

Patrick Hearps.  As to when the selected projects break down, or break ground…? (laughter in background)

Scott Bilby.  Well, given the technologies they’ve chosen...

Matthew Wright.  Maybe they will break down! 

Patrick Hearps.  Well look to be honest I can’t really comment on when that’s going to happen.  What we actually saw is the guidelines put out for tender late last year, and submissions were put in a couple of months ago, I believe in February.  And now after a couple more months they’ve sort of short-listed and there could quite easily be…

Matthew Wright.  The government’s spending $15 million on giving these eight proponents, the four solar photo-voltaic (that’s the rooftop style solar) and the four solar-thermal plants that are applicants for the final two winners, to pick the final two winners, they’re giving $15 million out to write those plans.  That is happening. They are going to spend next year but originally it was going to be this year, so it’s kind of like, if they can get away with it, they’ll just keep dragging it out forever.  So who knows, it’s a hard bet as to whether it will happen.  I think there are a lot of companies out there - they’re very keen to actually build these.  Whether the government is providing a serious environment for that to occur, well that’s anyone’s guess.

Patrick Hearps.  Well it’s interesting to compare the Solar Flagships program to what goes on, say, in Spain, or the U.S.  So Solar Flagships here is putting a little bit of money up front to build a few solar projects and that’s it, like there’s no guarantee of ongoing support after that.  Because the thing is about a technology like solar-thermal is that the first set of plants, as Matt mentioned, are going to be more expensive and you have to ride the cost reduction trajectory and you’re not going to get from, you’re not going to get down to competitive price via the whole cost reduction trajectory after building two projects.  That’s just not going to happen.  You need more scale than that.  So over in Spain they’ve put in place a feed-in tariff that supports the whole solar-thermal industry and that’s leveraged $20 billion of investment and 2500 MW of solar-thermal to be built in the next 3 years.  Over in Spain, similar they have an investment tax credit which has also allowed many hundreds of megawatts of solar-thermal projects.

Matthew Wright.  So it’s designed to get project after project after project…

Patrick Hearps.  That’s correct.

Scott Bilby.  Now that lack of a guarantee from the Federal government, and governments full stop in Australia, of ongoing support for renewables is a bit of a tradition in Australia…

Matthew Wright.  Yeah, it’s a cultural thing…

Scott Bilby.  We have this cultural thing, we still give lots of money, ongoing, in subsidies to the fossil fuel sector yet we refuse to do it for the renewable energy.  Now am I being a bit suspicious when I say that perhaps that’s what they want to do?  To make sure that the industry never gets off the ground?

Patrick Hearps.  Well, look, if they were serious about building a solar-thermal industry in Australia they would be offering a lot more support than what they are now.  I mean $1.5 billion in the context of what we spend on other things in absolute peanuts.  I mean, in the budget that was announced recently I believe they are going to spend 28 point something billion dollars on new roads over the next few years, so there’s a national imperative to build more roads for example.  Now when the CPRS, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was …

Matthew Wright.  Yeah, the one that didn’t actually reduce any pollution.

Patrick Hearps.  Well, you know, ‘Carbon Polluter’s Racket Scheme’, or whatever you want to call it.  That was proposing in the order of $10 billion just in handouts to large polluting companies to compensate them for their lack of profits under the CPRS and that would have been money that didn’t really achieve anything.  So in the context of that the 1.5 billion they’re putting up for Solar Flagships is very, very small.

Scott Bilby.  Okay, now we’re speaking with Patrick Hearps.  He’s the technical director at Beyond Zero Emissions.  He’s been working on our Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan with a lot of other people, very talented people in the group, that’s going to be launched at Melbourne University on July the 14th.

Matthew Wright.  And, we were talking about those linear Fresnel plants, and the actual specific projects that seem to have caught the interest of the government for the short listing.  They’re a bit bizarre really.  I mean they call them solar boosters, I mean I guess they’re pre-heating steam into a coal plant.  It seems like it’s perhaps a continuance of the government’s obsession with coal because you’ve got solar, but you’ve got to somehow to put it together with coal.  Are these coal plants on life support with a bunch of solar plants hanging off them?  What’s the story with these linear Fresnel systems Patrick?

Patrick Hearps.  Yeah well, so let’s just understand - so two of the other projects that have been short listed for Solar Flagships using the linear Fresnel mirror technology but basically attaching them as an appendage to an existing coal plant.  Now what they will be, so instead of having your own mirror field with your own turbine and ideally your own storage system and having a stand-alone solar storage plant, what they’re actually doing is simply setting up a mirror field next to a coal plant and directly generating steam and just feeding that in to the coal power plant’s existing steam cycle.  So best case scenario is that you displace a bit of the coal from the coal plant.  Now it’s basically a very low risk, a very…

Scott Bilby.  Sorry, you don’t have to stop for me Patrick but I was just going to ask you what sort of percentage of the power plant could the linear Fresnel panels kind of contribute to?  Like do you have any idea on that?

Patrick Hearps.  Well, I mean how much they could contribute; it’s different to how much they would contribute.  Essentially you could build one of these power plants as large as you want.  What we’re likely going to see is, for example, the equivalent of 150 MW of linear Fresnel attached to a 750 MW coal fired power station, so perhaps at the best case.  But even then they don’t have storage, so that’s only going to operate when the sun’s out so overnight you’re going to continue to burn the 750 MW worth of coal.  Now why they’ve gone down this path?  It’s potentially the low risk, conservative option they could have got.

Matthew Wright.  Let’s just look at why it is.  Firstly, because they’re injecting the steam into another stage of the turbine, basically you can’t run this coal plant without burning coal at the very moment that you’re generating power.  Like it won’t run only on solar, is that right?

Patrick Hearps.  That’s correct.

Matthew Wright.  And um, on top of that, so they’ve made it that you have to have coal burning at the time you’re generating.  The solar power can only bump a bit of the coal burning, so that again makes it a bit of a tut-tut pathetic thing on the side, and I think that’s where perhaps the government’s framing is at.  The other question about it is that the locations of these plants - are they ideal locations?

Patrick Hearps.  Well, I think the two linear Fresnel projects proposed are both going to be in Queensland, so that’s at least a further northern site so you’re not going to get as much of a winter drop-off.  And again, they’ve just picked these projects because they’re such low risk, and because basically, if you look at the funding arrangement for Flagships it didn’t actually put up the correct amount of money that you would need to get a large stand-alone power station off the ground, so that makes the linear Fresnel appendage to an existing coal plant a much more attractive option.  You know, if you don’t give enough money to something, then you go with the cheap and nasty version which is whacking a couple of mirrors next to a coal plant without building a stand-alone power station.

Matthew Wright.  We’ve heard that, from some of the leading vendors, for power towers or for plants with storage you’re talking about an unsubsidized cost in Australia of about 21-22 cents per kWh electrical.  So that’s about four times the price of coal.  That wouldn’t be the story; you know we talked about the cost-reduction trajectory earlier, that wouldn’t be the story with these plants if we actually set up an industry would it?  The price would come down quite rapidly, and where would it go?

Patrick Hearps.  Well that’s correct.  I mean the current price of 22 cents per kWh is quite competitive considering these are the first of a kind projects.  And it’s also, if you convert it, so that’s 22 cents Australian, if you look the production costs over at operating plants in Spain that’s already roughly half the cost of the operating plants over in Spain.  So what the electricity price the projects are proposing in Australia is already about half the cost of the Spanish plants.

Matthew Wright.  That’s amazing.  Picking this technology is picking a winner but somehow the government has found a subset of it that’s not a winner.   I just don’t understand how they could pull it off.

Patrick Hearps.  Well that’s probably got to do with political risk.  I mean, it’s interesting - there’s a perception of, they’ve re-announced the Solar Flagships just after the CPRS has failed and they want something to work.  So unfortunately on climate and energy efficiency and energy the current government hasn’t had much of a track record.  The CPRS has been an ongoing disaster, they’ve made a complete hash of the insulation scheme, and the Green Loan Scheme and basically everything they’ve touched has turned, has crumbled to dust.  So they’re probably kind of desperate to get something to work and the thing about sticking a few mirrors next to a coal plant is that even if they’re so incompetent, whoever’s building it, that they can’t even connect the pipes and get the thing to work at least you can take a photo of the mirrors next to the coal plant and pretend its doing something.

Matthew Wright.  Yeah, and the coal just keeps burning and running the coal plant and no-one realizes that nobody’s actually switched the steam from the mirror field into the plant.

Scott Bilby.  No, they still look nice and shiny in the sun.

Matthew Wright.  Yeah, it just looks good.

Scott Bilby.  So I guess, with our mining and energy minister at a Federal level, Martin Ferguson, I guess if you’re calling him into a room to give you advice on the Solar Flagships program, well yes, this is probably the result you’d get, really, isn’t it, given his ignorance of the technology?

Patrick Hearps.  Oh yeah, it’s probably the mindset of ‘if it doesn’t have coal its not going to work’.

Scott Bilby.  Now we’ve just been speaking to Patrick Hearps.  He’s the Technical Director at Beyond Zero Emissions, and we’ve been talking about the Solar Flagships program in Australia.  So getting back to the topic at present - the Solar Flagships program,  It sounds like they’re making a lot of noises to make it sound like they’re doing the right thing but there’s probably not the intestinal fortitude behind it to really push that, they probably don’t really believe in it, like what’s going on there?

Patrick Hearps.  No, I mean it’s probably even being used as a bit of a political tool.  You saw just before the budget came out and just after the Federal government canned the CPRS and took it off the table (that was their main piece of legislation that was allegedly going to do something about climate change and that’s now off the table until 2013) and so they tried making up for that by re-announcing the Solar Flagships program from last year.  The money had already been allocated in last year’s budget, and saying things like ‘it’s going to be the largest roll-out of renewable energy that this country’s ever seen’.  Well, maybe it will be actually, because unfortunately this country doesn’t have a great track record on renewable energy.

Matthew Wright.  It hasn’t seen much renewable energy.  A lot of talk though.

Patrick Hearps.  But anyway, just because you’re doing a little bit more than nothing doesn’t mean you beat your chest that that’s the largest thing we’ve ever seen.  I mean, look, another thing about, say, the U.S as well as putting in place the ongoing support for the solar industry they’ve also thrown dozens of new employees at the Bureau of Land Management that’s helping to fast track the land permitting and the planning proposals for all those solar programs.

Matthew Wright.  I think the U.S. Department of Energy has brought people on, the California Energy Commission has brought people on, so all these government agencies are bringing people in to make sure these projects happen quickly and in Australia it’s probably just block after block after block.

Patrick Hearps.  That’s right, and they’ve actually got the goal of a number of these projects are going to get them through the planning process and make sure they break ground by the end of this year, by the end of 2010.

Scott Bilby.  And people have to realize there will be a carbon price, no matter how much Australians are in denial there will be a carbon price, so it’s going to affect the fossil fuel sector and so all that renewable energy, all that alternative sort of energy, whatever name you want to give it, people might not like the green sounding name, but big commercial stuff like the solar-thermal power, and the wind power, that’s going to provide heaps of jobs but we’re missing that boat right now.

Patrick Hearps.  Oh completely.  I mean Australia’s being left behind.  It is amazing to see so many other countries from around the world.  Germany, for example, has a huge solar-thermal program and thousands of megawatts of PV and they don’t live in that much of a, that sunny a country compared to Australia.

Matthew Wright.  It’s solar PV under a cloud, but what they have done is build a massive industry.

Scott Bilby.  We’re going to have to wrap it up here, but thank you very much for coming in Patrick and talking about the Solar Flagships program in Australia. 

Patrick Hearps.  Thank you.