Prof Ian Bates backs Australian research to deliver the breakthrough Technique Solar Module (TSM)

Beyond Zero Emissions' Mathew Wright and Scott Bilby talk to Professor Ian Bates, head of technology at Technique Solar, about the science and implementation of new solar technologies in Australia.

The Technique Solar technology achieves solar conversion efficiency between 50% - 60% compared with an efficiency typically ranging between 15% -18% for conventional PV panels. This technology breakthrough makes it possible to now deliver solar energy more economically and more efficiently than other currently known forms of solar energy production.

Beyond Zero interviews Professor Ian Bates of Technique Solar

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Transcript

Scott Bilby:  My name is Scott Bilby and with me as usual is Mathew Wright.  Hello Matthew.

Matthew Wright: Hello Scott

Scott Bilby: Now today on Beyond Zero we’re speaking with Ian Bates, Head of Technology at Technique Solar.  They are an Australian company and they are Melbourne based.  Prior to this Ian was RMIT University’s Professor of Micro Technology and he was a Director of the Micro Technology Systems Centre in the College of Science and Engineering.  He also held a senior position with the former State Electricity of Victoria.  Welcome to the show, Ian.

Ian Bates:  Thank you Matthew and thank you Scott.

Scott Bilby: It’s great to have you with us this morning in the studio with us.  Now we usually ask a rather standard question of each guest which they quite enjoy and that is how did you first get interested in renewable energy and I guess in your case it would be how did you got interested in solar energy? 

Ian Bates:   Okay well Scott, it really started in the latter part of my career in the SCC where I looked after the transmission development activity and we were starting the look into solar energy and wind energy.  When I left the SEC, I joined RMIT and was still interested to carry that forward so I was involved in development, with a number of engineers from the Ford Motor Company, of the Aurora solar car development which is a fantastic activity.  I was very enthused for the students to be involved and that was a really big development and I have to say the one of the biggest things was winning the solar challenge in 1999 from Darwin to Adelaide.

Scott Bilby: Congratulations

Ian Bates: And subsequently, one of the students by the name of Dennis Thoroughgood came to me to say he wanted to work in solar energy for his research and I said well, the biggest challenge is to get solar energy economic.  That started back in about 2002 and that’s brought as the starting point to bring us to where we are now.

Scott Bilby: Keeping solar economical is what we are all about so we are going to be very interested in hearing your story.  Now I just wanted to ask you this other questions.  So about 30 years ago you were at the SEC Victoria and what did you think 2010 was going to be like as far as energy generation was going to be like

Matthew Wright: Just to mention, the SEC is the State Electricity Commission of Victoria.  Prior to privatisation the State Electricity Commission of Victoria was the authority that ran our electricity supply system. 

Scott Bilby:  So was it generation, transmission etc ?

Ian Bates:  Yes generation, transmission and distribution.  They were the three areas.  I was in what was called the Transmission which is the main transmission for bringing the energy from the generating sources to the load centre and interconnecting with other systems.

Scott Bilby:  Okay, so what was your vision of 2010 or was it just too far out to even consider?

Ian Bates:  Well, I go back into thinking about and I suppose it was the start of things that I have since built up in my own feelings and that is we couldn’t possibly go on using the growth of energy and the rate we were then.  We were at that stage growing by something like 8% a year.  That means that in something like ten years you would use double the energy you did in the whole previous period and one started to feel that that’s not where we are going to be able to continue.  I can highlight that particularly in a country like Indonesia, they use about the same energy as Australia but their population is 10 times ours. India, similarly, they have a population that is something like 50 times ours but they only use 5 times the energy that we use.  So in both of those countries per head of persons they use one tenth of what we use.  So if they aspire to what we do in using energy then we are going to have major issues so we have to find a way of all parties coming to a better approach to dealing with the energy use in the future. 

Scott Bilby:  Okay, so we’ll talk about Technique Solar, the company you’re with now and can you just for the audience tell us briefly how it started because it started as a spinoff from RMIT?

Ian Bates:  We started the work in solar energy and I’d had contact with them before.  They funded a development of what we call the superbike that I was involved with which was quite a good development.  The bike used back in the Olympics in the just late 90’s. 

Matthew Wright:  Sounds like a carbon fibre bike or something?

Ian Bates: That’s right.  It was a monocoque shape bike and we called it the super bike and it was a very good project and I said to them look we have another project that building up that you might like to be involved in and it’s to do with getting solar energy economic.  And so Technique Solar was established and they funded several million dollars over the seven years that the project had been going. In September last year they took the move to ask the team that had been developing it, there were 4 students some had completed PhD’s others are still completing.  I with them joined Technique Solar to bring in to this commercial stage.

Scott Bilby:  Okay and when did that happen?  When did you actually start building the module? The time between starting to build the new module and up til now, how long has that been?

Ian Bates:  It’s been 7 years.  The first couple of years was the student activity and then it became a serious activity something like 2004-2005 and so it’s been 5 years of the prototype built at RMIT and we tested and developed and demonstrated the technology was proven.  So in the last couple of years we have been moving them to turn it into a commercial activity.

Matthew Wright:  And how many researchers are working on that and what sort of backgrounds do they have?  Is it physicists and mechanical engineers or sort of work?

Ian Bates:  Very cross discipline.  One is an electrical engineer, one’s an electronic engineer and one is an aerospace engineer.   More recently another one has come into the team and he’s got more of an engineering/science/physics background.  So it’s very cross disciplined.  My own background is more from a systems engineering and a total bringing together different technologies.

Scott Bilby: So I guess you are here to talk at the Techniques Solar module that you have got, the PV solar module.  Can you just basically describe that for the audience?

Ian Bates:  Yes.  I’ll tell some the background and then evolve to what it looks like.  We really set out to overcome problems in solar energy costing as it is at the moment and if the listeners can understand that with the variation of the sun during the day, in Melbourne here, if you had a 1 kilowatt system installed, and effectively it’s only used at 1 kilowatt for an average of 4 hours per day.  That’s the average amount of energy you would get.  It would be like that asset being utilised only for 4 hours.  Now for 4 hours out of 24 hours that means it at 16% usage at the cost of putting in an asset of that rating or that size.  So we had to say what do we got to do to improve that? Out of research, the obvious came - the cells are the biggest cost.  Improving the cell efficiency has always been a bigger increase in the cost so somehow we’ve got to find a way of reducing the cost of the cells.  That came to using a low level of concentration and understanding a lot about how the cells work and we came to a concentration level of about 5.  We will be able to get 3 times the power out of the kind of cells that we’ve studied and understood as capable of delivering this.  That means for the same electrical output we only needed to use a third of the cells.

Scott Bilby:  So you’ve got a 5 metre square panel that pivots and tracks the sun.  It’s got...Can you describe how it would concentrate the light onto those slivers of cells?

Ian Bates:  There’s 10 strings and they’re in troughs side by side where they about 20 centimetres wide cells giving a concentration of 5 on that string of cells and then that’s repeated across 10 troughs and that has an output nearly half a kilowatt

Matthew Wright:  So there are ten lines per panel?

Ian Bates:  Yes, that’s right

Matthew Wright:  And those ten lines are tracking azimuth or east to west?

Ian Bates:  From east to west, that’s right

Matthew Wright:  So azimuth tracking.  Are they design so they can be put in place of current solar panels?  So they can just be put on roofs or are they heavier and have to just go on large warehouse roofs?  Are they light enough that they can just be placed anywhere?

Ian Bates: They can go everywhere you put conventional panels so the weight will be something like 100kg over the 5 square metres.  And let me just go back and explain the other factor.  By putting concentration onto the cells, we then heat them up.  What we do is, through this very clever approach to the collection of heat, we are able to then collect from this new kind of array that has being developed. It’s a special lens and a special array. The array collects electricity as well as heat energy so it’s almost a 2 kilowatt system and we collect 1/3 electricity from it and 2/3 heat.  Overall, that reduces the cost to something like a third to a quarter of current cost of energy from a solar system. 

Matthew Wright:  So what’s your plan for the heat in summer? Absorption chilling perhaps? Or in winter providing heat for domestic or commercial space heating?  Is there any plan for the heat?

Ian Bates: The plan at the initial stage is we collect that by circulating water through the array that the cells are mounted on.  That is stored in a tank and the aim of that is to be then an in feed to the normal hot water service in a household.  With the kinds of energy we collect, it matches the kind of use for an average household.  So that mean that in the summer, when we get our maximum heat collection, the houses that get the most benefit are those then that can use that daily for their shower and the normal use of hot water.  An average household can do that with the size of the module. 

Matthew Wright: It said 65 degrees so that’s a good match because I think in Australia generally water is stored in tanks at just under the standard of 65 degrees

Ian Bates:  That’s right and we have chosen that temperature to have the whole system operate at so it that it fits into the normal reticulation of water in a safe manner.

Matthew Wright:  And I think that is very efficient use of roof space.  In some locations people have large roofs but many, if you look at retrofit situations in older cities, many roofs only have 5 or 10 metres free.  So you are competing; do you go solar hot water heater or do you go PV panels?  But this approach of a combined heat and power system obviously give you them both on the same location.

Ian Bates:  That’s right and for the same power output.  We’ve got 5 square metres whereas the typical cell panels have something like 12 metres.

Scott Bilby:  Can I just say that it helps with what I’ve heard before that people have not much roof, they have to trade-off between solar hot water or PV electricity generation...

Matthew Wright:  Like Scott’s roof!

Scott Bilby:  Like my roof which is overshadowed by my 80 year old neighbours’ house which is a bit unfortunate. So this could be a system I could use on my roof for domestic purposes?

Scott Bilby:  Okay, that’s good to hear.

Matthew Wright:  That’s certainly the solution Scott’s been looking for. 

Scott Bilby: I have one very interesting question for you Ian; you guys on your website were talking about rolling out this technology of your Technique Solar modules as infrastructure.  I think someone was saying having the Australian thing of tacking your solar thing on the house as an afterthought.  How are you going to turn that around and make it a sort of infrastructure solution? 

Ian Bates:  Okay, let me lead into that by saying that what the panel has been able to achieve is an output of energy about 20 to 30 cents per kilowatt hour.  That’s comparable with the household energy delivered at the house.  By the time the energy that is generated in remote locations where the power sources are and getting it to the house, it’s something like 18 to 20 cents.  So now what we have been able to achieve is a solar energy that can compete without a cost penalty to the available energy from the grid now.  Now coming back directly to your question, what have I seen where big developments in society and technology have been achieved?  Basically it’s been achieved where there is leadership taken to develop the infrastructure that allows that technology to be used.  The car was nothing without roads being developed.  The telephone was nothing without the network being developed.  And in a more latter era, the internet and use of personal computer was really not able to happen until the internet was put into place.  So what we are having here is to make solar energy available, we want to develop a network of solar panels that are provided to people at no capital cost, just like the electrical wires that run down the street.  So basically, it’s installed on the house and they then pay for the cost of that installation and the kinds of returns that are sought by the investor.  We want to roll this out as infrastructure so people don’t have to worry about something that’s put on the roof that they can’t get to.  It’s rather put there as an asset that provides infrastructure to supply solar energy to people.  It opens up the way so that people don’t have to worry about capital cost.  It would be made available for people to use solar energy if that’s what they want to do by having infrastructure owners roll this out throughout the cities and on people’s roofs.  Then that has the benefit of providing fixed price solar energy.  You pay for the return of investment on that capital and you get an average amount of solar energy.  So it’s really an infrastructure means.  People don’t have to worry ‘is it working properly?’It will be maintained like other infrastructure.

Scott Bilby:  Okay so the people who own this infrastructure, all these modules you can roll out on the roofs.  Will they be selling to the domestic consumer, or would I as the domestic consumer lease that or how would that work?

Ian Bates:  It is like a rental lease.  In other words, it’s fixed price electricity covering the cost that return the infrastructure owner needs to get to be able to keep in going and keep paying and get returns on the investment.

Scott Bilby:  Okay, they would have a big advantage to them because, I guess, you’ve got the grid and the infrastructure upgrades that are required with the current system, I guess that if you start rolling your system out on a large scale your kind of avoiding that altogether.

Ian Bates:  I guess what we are trying to do is get this balance.  Really it’s a very good way of improving the efficiency of any energy use.  In effect, your reducing the amount of energy that the house would otherwise use, your reducing the amount of energy that has to be drawn from the grid, and so that allows for less losses in the grid

Matthew Wright:  And less network augmentation...

Ian Bates:  Less augmentation of the grid.  So we see it as something that balances and can bring solar energy to a stage of being useful without there being any problems or penalties either to the public or governments for having subsidised and so forth.  So really it opens the way, this infrastructure, for all people to have access to solar energy. 

Matthew Wright:  So you need something like a seven year payback term in order to finance it over 10 or 15 years?

Ian Bates:  The payback is about six years and there is quite a nice return for the investor over 15 years that we are thinking in terms in the right kind of life to judge...

Matthew Wright:  And then are you thinking you might just try and partner with a smart retailer and get them to do all the marketing and then build it into the electricity bill or...?

Ian Bates:  Well it’s really people who are really attracted to this kind of development it gives a return of their investment.  For example, we are negotiating at the moment with a party who is planning to roll out in affordable housing.  The initial order in principle, once we have sorted out the manufacturing and got the pre-production models assured and working properly, there is a plan to have a take up of 40 000 units and that would be our first commencement of orders.  We are working to talk to manufacturers now and look at the kinds of people but it’s really investors.  It could turn out to be local councils that might take this over.  That goes back to when I started by career in the electricity commission the councils were the ones who were building the infrastructure to distribute the electricity so they could attract residents and businesses around Melbourne and to be with it.  Now they have the chance of being a clean city as a result of organising for people to pay for it as part of their rates as a possibility.

Scott Bilby:  I like the sound of that a lot, it’s a very positive vision.  We are speaking with Ian Bates, head of technology with Technique Solar.  So you started talking about the road to commercialisation and what interests people have shown.  Can you talk a little bit about the interest you’ve had in Victoria, in Australia and in other countries like India?

Ian Bates:  Well, I’ll stick with Australia first.  We have been approached by a number of manufacturers and we’re talking to them.  This requires setting up a new kind of production line and it means adaption and going into a new development and we are really looking forward to being able to do that in Victoria here.  We are talking with the government about their priorities and how they might be interested in helping manufacturers to tool up and be ready take up this kind of product.  So we are in the final stages of getting all the technical details into a form that we can give to manufacturers so that they can come back with the kind of quotes, proposals of how they propose to go about it. It involves a number of skills; it’s a cross discipline activity.  That’s the kind of thing we are going to have to find a way of intergrading.  Overseas, as I said before, we have been to India and Indonesia and they’ve planned quite large growths in supply of energy.  What we are hoping and they are very keen to try to find a way of intergrading into their visions for what they want to do, in looking into energy for the future.   We are looking to help them to introduce solar energy as part of that.  They have got to establish their plans for doing that.  Currently they are down a path with other kinds of ways of doing it but once we get established here with the manufacturing process, they will be very keen to come back and talk and find that this is working okay.  I’m sure there will be a lot of applications and similarly in China.

Matthew Wright:  I didn’t see that you bought your crystal ball but just wonder how long do you reckon it will be before we could be commercial availability?

Scott Bilby:  One on my roof!

Matthew Wright:  Exactly, one on Scott’s house, off the shelf?

Ian Bates:  Well, we hope to really start rolling them out in 2011.  So in the next 6 months is when we really get up the production, have a number of units, preproduction proven and we take it through all the ropes that are needed and ensure that everything in okay.  And then start to open up this order in principle that we have received that of course depends on a demonstration in the next 6 months.  I have a vision that we will roll out something like 50 000 modules a year and that would pick up something like 10% of the growth of energy in Victoria, doing that kind of thing over the 10 years.  That would be a fantastic contribution to greenhouse challenges and helping to meet the targets for renewable energy.

Scott Bilby:  And transforming our economy and creating jobs too?

Ian Bates:  Yes.  That’s a big part of it.  The manufacturing will certainly be creating quite a number of jobs and also the service industry that is created.  And it may be in those areas that it’s helping to keep things rolling that otherwise may have fallen into a heap that already exists.

Matthew Wright:  We were talking about network augmentation costs.  One of my hobby horses is always to pair heat pumps up as the boosting in winter instead of using resistive elements or gas.  I was wondering what you’re opinion on that is.  I know it’s not commercially available yet but a couple of the BZE team have heat pump boosted evacuated tube systems at home now, so in other words they use evacuated tubes for say, 60% of the heat they are getting on an annual basis and then the heat pump runs at a coefficient of performance of 2 or 3 to boost it for the rest of the time reducing the load on the grid.  They are DC inverter ones so they don’t create a power factor havoc with the grid.  So I was wondering what your opinion was there?

Ian Bates:  I encourage that kind of development because I think that really, those kinds of applications are the way to improve the efficiency.  Perhaps I will give you more of the thinking behind us.  We see that for central heating and for air-conditioning this becomes a very big part.  The issue that I really say about energy is it doesn’t make sense to use water, boil it into steam at a remote location, send it down the wires and then supply it as electricity and turn it into heat into heating water.  The more you can avoid the changing of the energy from one form to the other at the site of the load and use it.  Solar energy gives us that chance, we can make electricity at the load, we can make heat at the load.  What you really want to do it feed that into devices that are very efficient.  In the heat pump, it’s this coefficient of performance.  You want to get those at levels that don’t lose heat in changing into cooling and heating.

Matthew Wright:  I guess we can use a combination of solar energy and renewable ambient heat to deliver our 24-7 winter and summer hot water service?

Ian Bates:  Yes, that is the challenge and I am aware of the report Beyond Zero have put out that have that ambition. 

Scott Bilby:  Now I’d just like to ask you, I do recall I asked you this questions a little bit before the interview.  Are their comparable technologies out there?

Ian Bates:  No, this is really one of its kind.  People have attempted things like this before but there is a tremendous amount of know-how that has been developed over these five years that really have turned this giving a new solar array that can collect both heat and electricity and having the kind of things that surround that and overcome the problems that are needed to be solved as well.  It’s unique and we are looking forward to seeing it really go ahead and making a real contribution to the movement to renewable energy.

Matthew Wright:  Just one more technical question for the geeks out there because I don’t think we have mentioned it.  The lines have a particular kind of lens of them.  Can you just mention the lens?

Ian Bates:  Yeah, it’s a Fresnel lens.  The design of that is part of the electro properties that really delivers to the services a very uniform concentration of the light.

Scott Bilby:  Now we have just been speaking to Ian Bates and he’s the Head of Technology at Technique Solar and if you want to know more about Technique Solar, can you tell us the URL, the web address for that?

(www.techniquesolar.com.au)

Scott Bilby:  Ian thank you very much for coming in and thank you Matt.

Ian Bates:  It’s a pleasure, Scott.