So solar would be available during the day, and by storing some, in the early evening and the following morning for heating, getting breakfast etc. So the strategy was to provide 1.35 times the peak power needed during the day and store the 0.35 for use in the evening and early morning. Storing more than that would blow out the costs too much.

So it is not intended to be a major source of power, but fit into a smorgasbord of offerings.

Another interesting aspect is that because of their global reach WorleyParsons is already involved in a range of solar projects around the world, including California. They did see a role for manufacturing some components locally in the Oz program.

Solar can’t compete with coal (yet) without carbon pricing, but when considering WA power prices you need to consider 2 things:

1. WA gas prices are rapidly heading towards parity with international LNG prices (which is what the gas companies want) and they have a shortage of gas for the domestic market.

2. International LNG prices are only heading one way.

3. 2 major gas supply disruptions to WA over the past 12 months have cost local industry billions of dollars in lost income - diversifying away from gas has a lot of other benefits besides just cost comparisons.

4. Solar thermal prices will drop as volumes expand and the components start to achieve economies of scale - comparisons to bespoke plants built in Spain that led this new wave of construction aren’t really fair.

North west WA is probably the best place on the planet for building large scale solar thermal, with the possible exception of some parts of the Mojave near LA.

I think pretty much every stakeholder in WA has something to gain from this development, so it may well be reality before too long.

Many traders don’t like buying stocks unless they have significant volumes of trades. I suspect Petratherm is a bit under the radar and would need some exciting announcement to stir up some activity. The whole sector of geothermal energy is a bit under the radar. Petratherm could nevertheless be long term investment. I’d say it depends mainly on the quality of the management, which is the hardest thing to know anything about. So in short I wouldn’t presume to advise.

I checked out Geodynamics and they are only followed by ABN AMRO who have a “strong buy” on it. I have access to their research and it seems that they concentrate on companies with a market cap of $300m-$1b in the small cap sector.

Hopefully big things from little things grow!

“What is new - at least in terms of industrial implementation rather than prototyping - about their proposed plant is the used of thermal energy storage. As I’ve tried to point out on many occasions, the problem with intermittent renewables isn’t simply their cost; it’s that their power production occurs only when the renewable resource is available, which means you need some kind of backup when it’s not.”

…..now, says that you really haven’t been following the information on CSP at all well. If you care to read this…..

http://www.solar-thermie.org/hintergruende/documents/cspnow.pdf

…..,information that has been around for a few years now, you will see that the storage technology has been installed an running for years and is giving up to 8 hours storage. Further if you care to follow the implementation steps (in the publication) you will see that at step 4 there is a reasonably clear costing formula.

The Spanish installation is expensive because it is just 1 fifth of the economic optimal 250 megawatt size. The optimum size is determined by the heat medium pumping distance to the turbine house. And it is the turbine house which is the most expensive cost item in the system, an item that must be present regardless of the size of the installation. The other limiting factor is the mirror production environment. For a small plant these mirrors must be produced elsewhere and transported, whereas for 250 megawatt and upwards the mirror plant will be built on site with all of the cost efficiencies that that brings. And on top of all of that is the cost of 1 square kilometre or European landscape.

No level playing field there.

If you would prefer to read all of that from the glossey brochure, I have a few of them here, and would be happy to send you one.

And the difference between the Ausra and SEGS systems in efficiency is also explained in the PDF file. Simply put the Ausra (fresnel reflector system) allows for over 400,000 square metres of reflector area per square kilometre but achieves a lower temperature against the SEGS 350,000 square metres per square kilometre at 400deg C. The area differences are in the casting of shadows and mirror efficiencies.

All up the Worley Parsons project proposal is double what it should be 2 billion dollars per gigawatt is a fair thumb guide for multimegawatt installations), but then as a first plant with the extra costs of transmission cables, setting up the process in a new country, building a mirror plant from scratch, building a whole new town for the staff, maybe it is reasonable.

Or maybe it is a political scare off proposal!

One thing that is a bit odd is that Geodynamics 2009 options (GDYOA) are trading at 20c, which would suggest that the market thinks that there is a good chance that Geodynamics will trade at $2.20 next year, a bit higher than their current price of $1.31.

Coal generators have 60 years of infrastructure set up to deliver electricity from LaTrobe Valley etc to the far reaches of the land, a benefit not shared by wind or geothermal.

Important point. Chapter 17 of the Garnaut Review Draft Report (network infrastructure market failures) discusses this issue. It is also worth checking out the “TREC” proposal to use high voltage DC transmission lines to supply power for Europe from renewable infrastructure.

But the fact is - and JQ has pointed this out many times to you - even if it doubles or triples in price, it will still be affordable, particularly if you use it more efficiently.

A doubling or tripling of energy prices is a near certainty. I mean, oil doubled in less than 12 months, and coal prices tripled overnight recently. Far more likely we’ll see price rises of an order of magnitude or more over the next 5-10 years. You can’t conserve your way out of that!

The price of oil rose 15-fold in nominial terms between 1998-2008. Who’s to say that won’t happen again over the next 5 years, especially if we do hit the “supply crunch” in 2010 that the IEA is forecasting? If that happens it will put enormous pressure on energy prices across-the-board, both fossil and renewable. How much will it cost to rebuild our entire energy infrastructure with oil at $500/barrel? Sounds absurd now, but $120/barrel would have seemed impossible in the late 90s.

Seems to me both you and JQ assume we will be rebuilding our energy infrastructure in a benign economic environment, and in a world without energy constraints. It seems unlikely this will be the case.

The major point about solar energy in OZ is that the majority of the population lives on the East coast in cities strung out on a North South axis -so we tend to track each others power usage. (We are talking solar time here - eg it gets dark along the east coast at the same instant- more or less-for every-body) If we all lived along the East West axis we would have two hours of “spread” of solar energy.

Parabolic trough systems that use oil as the transfer mechanism have actually caught fire in the US;a huge fire, so care will be required. I think that is why others have elected to use water as the heat transfer medium.

The upside of solar thermal is that its conversion efficiency is about 20-35% Photo-Voltaic is sort of stuck in the 10-20% well.

One way to solve the intermittency problem is to add in a gas fired front cycle using a gas turbine and to direct the turbine exhaust to steam raising;

I like the systems where you build a boiler/collector on a tower and bombard it with reflections from a whole bunch of heliostats. The advantage of this is that you can get the temperature high enough to use liquid sodium as a thermal storage medium. Liquid Sodium has a high specific heat, high melting point and is used in nukes as a thermal transfer medium - so it is readily available and well understood.
Huggy

“Sodium chloride isn’t used, because its melting point is far higher [than nitrate salts].”

I’m sure you’re both right, but there’s gotta be more to it than that. Graphite melts at 3700 degrees while sodium chloride melts at 800 degrees.

There are laws against insider information, but there will always be people who know more than I do about what’s going on. Also brokers don’t follow the tiddlers, so there’s usually no advice there except perhaps from a firm involved in the float, and that’s inherently unreliable.

It makes it hard for ordinary people.

The price of gas over the longer term may well be heading up, making such calculations look more favourable to the solar option.

- the intermittency factor is bit of a furphy, as long as there are sufficient plants across a wide enough area. Even with wind (and a well-connected grid) it’s blowing somewhere. The South Austalian electricity market has been studied by NEMMCO and is demonstrably cheaper with wind in the mix. If you divide the total annual electricity output of Australia by the total installed capacity the average is just over 50% ie that’s the load factor of the fossil fuel installed base. Load growth is not so much baseload (well catered for by coal) but in the intermediate to peak loads (ie hot sunny days where people run their airconditioners). In this scenario, solar makes sense - see the work done by Muriel Watt at UNSW.

- one very big problem for renewables is that the energy source is usually not close to the population centres. It costs nearly as much to connect to the grid as it does to build the wind/solar/hydro plant. Coal generators have 60 years of infrastructure set up to deliver electricity from LaTrobe Valley etc to the far reaches of the land, a benefit not shared by wind or geothermal. Solar is far more distributed - a big solar plant could be placed almost anywhere in an arc from Mildura up to Mt Isa and have a very well defined resource base. For fossil fuel to deliver electricity to Broken Hill, for example, the transmission costs are more than the generating cost, and a renewable generator needs only to be less than the total delivered cost.