Standing out in the increasingly crowded solar energy space isn't easy these days. But Australian-American startup Ausra seems to have managed to do just that.
Named after an ancient Indo-European goddess of the dawn, Palo Alto, California-based Ausra is a solar thermal technology company that, unlike many of its rivals, touts a means to produce electricity from sunlight that requires less fuss than conventional methods and could lower the cost of generating utility-scale power.
"You'd be mad to build a gas plant or a coal plant when there are technologies like this around," said CEO Peter Le Lièvre, who helped form the company late last year. Solar thermal power plants capture heat from sunlight and use it to generate electricity.
Ausra uses relatively inexpensive 40-foot-long flat plate mirrors–called Fresnel reflectors–to concentrate the sun's rays directly on water pipes, boiling the water to run steam turbines, which, in turn, generate electricity, according to a company representative.
The system, which the company says has the potential to generate electricity for two-thirds the cost of its competitors, has attracted more than $40 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ausra said Monday.
Concentrated solar power plants generally use trough-like structures whose curved mirrors focus sunlight onto tubes of oil. The heat from the oil is then used to create steam and to drive the electricity-generating turbine. But the mirrors must be precisely shaped and mounted on sun-tracking devices, requirements that make them more costly to make and repair, according to Ausra's executive vice president, John O'Donnell.
Ausra says its system can bring down the cost of solar power-generated electricity to be competitive with conventionally generated electricity. Ausra's Freshnel reflectors are flat, unlike the curved, finely tuned mirrors of the traditional trough design, according to the company.
"It's a mindset that's much more like Toyota than like NASA," Mr. O'Donnell said.
Ausra also directly heats water to generate steam, rather than first heating oil to generate heat. But the system is less efficient at converting solar energy to electricity than trough systems because it generates lower-temperature steam, Mr. O'Donnell said.
Ausra was originally founded in 2002 as Solar Heat and Power in Australia by David Mills, who originated the technology in the early 1990s at Sydney University, and Graham Morrison, who helped him develop it from 1995 to 2001.
Solar Heat and Power built a one-megawatt pilot project in Australia for Macquarie Generation in New South Wales in 2004. The company, which changed its name to Ausra and moved to the United States in February, is also working on a second 38-megawatt capacity power plant it expects to have finished by 2009.
The company plans to build a 180-megawatt power plant at an undisclosed United States location, and is beginning construction on a 6.5-megawatt plant in Portugal, according to Messrs. Le Lièvre and O'Donnell. The company also plans to open offices in California, Colorado, and Arizona and to double its staff to 100 by the end of the year, they said.
"You'll see us in action from coast to coast," Mr. Le Lièvre said.
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