Listen to podcast Interview with Dr David Mills former Sydney University academic now solar entrepreneur with US venture capital he has founded Ausra, a California-based company that develops zero carbon utilities scale solar thermal power plants.
Dr. David Mills is known worldwide for pioneering compact linear Fresnel reflector technology and for his work in non-imaging optics, solar thermal energy and Photvoltaic systems. His laboratory at the University of Sydney developed and licensed the evacuated tube solar water heater technology and he also originated and ran the research program that in 1991 with colleague Dr QC Xiang, developed an absorbent coating now using evacuated tube receivers by China's largest solar company. He also developed and co-developed other commercial systems including the system that we know in Australia as Solarhart
Scott Bilby: As you know there was a change of federal government in Australia over the weekend. You previously said that you have no plans to build anymore stuff in Australian until our energy policy changes. Are you optimistic that it will change under a Labor government and do you have plans for Australia if it does?
Dr David Mills: While I think the Labor government has said it was going to change and I do find that encouraging. I think they are talking about a 20% electricity requirement for renewables by 2020 which is a good start. We are already starting to get some interest and early phone calls from Australia, from people who are recognising that there is a change possible project developers. So I think the election has started to trigger that process.
Matthew Wright: In terms of your technology which we are hoping will come down to a price competitive with what coal is generated out of or something just a little bit above that, what is it that you need to get to that point were you are mass producing concentrated solar thermal reflective fresnel panels and you are able to generate electricity at a price that can have that electricity dispatched into the market and used by consumers all over Australia and they don't see any difference? What do you need?
Dr David Mills:Basically time and to some incentive, but not necessarily a lot. What's happening here is really that kind of process in the United States where we have temporary incentives in place that are 30% tax credit, for example on large installations which help us through. And there may be some smaller incentives along the way in other areas, usually state-based.
Together these allow us to propose plants which are at a price point which the most aggressive utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric are able to contemplate using right away. That's typically around the 10-11 cent per kilowatt hour level here for generation. Now that's higher than the coal price in Australia definitely, but it's a beginning and the thing that allows us to drop that cost further is one, continued R&D. We have a very good R&D program here now that's well funded but secondly, building very large plants. Large plants are more efficient. More efficient turbines cost less; the more the banks have confidence in us the more they allow us to build bigger and bigger plants.
Matthew Wright: So, one of the electricity companies that you have done a deal with Florida Power and Light (FPL), they have an interest in one of the existing plants which has been operating for 20 years so they're confident in the actual idea of solar thermal. What's the difference, what have you go to offer compared to these Mahari desert plants and why are Florida Power and Light are happy to back you.
Dr David Mills: We are still in negotiation with FPL. But there are a couple of things. Our cost is definitely lower than those old plants, but it's also lower than the new versions of those plants, which are called parabolic trough plants. Ours isn't a classic parabolic trough and its different in design for a number of technical reasons. It's quite a lot cheaper to put the field down compared to those old designs. Secondly, we also have a very robust design. Its very strong and for the particular Florida case you have the occasional high wind as you recall and when a hurricane goes through you don't want the entire array blown away. The older parabolic troughs were not built to that standard and FPL knows this. The modern ones aren't either. They wouldn't be able to withstand a hurricane but we think ours can.
Matthew Wright: So, just for listeners who might not be quite up to where we're at with compact linear fresnel systems and with concentrating solar thermal, can you explain simply how your plant works?
Dr David Mills: The whole filed of solar thermal electricity makes use of the fact that you can use the sun's energy concentrated with a lot of mirrors on to a smaller spot and use that to boil water. That's what we do in the fields. Our solar field is a gigantic boiler basically for water. It converts water into steam and that steam is the same water that goes straight through to the turbine and runs the turbine. We are also developing storage systems which hold the heat overnight so that we can run those kinds of turbines on a night and day basis.
Matthew Wright: In terms of water requirements, we're having significant water stress in Australia right now. How does it compare to a coal power plants or nuclear power plants' water requirements?
Dr David Mills: Currently, it would be roughly the same in the same area. That is if wet cooling were allowed, that's the thing that gives you these giant cooling towers with steam coming out of the top, we could use that and the coal plants could use that.
Actually, when you look at where we situate our plants, our plants are mostly in very dry desert areas where there is not much cloud, and water availability in those areas is a big issue. So, our very first plant which was recently announced as a project by PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric Company), its a 177 megawatts, has what's called dry cooling. That's a conventional technology which coal could use as well but its quite costly and it lowers our efficiency but it allows us to operate in those kinds of climates. We are developing advanced dry cooling which will be much cheaper and will also be much more efficient, but it's one of the side R&D projects we have.
Matthew Wright: We at Beyond Zero Emissions have heard from Keith Lovegrove at ANU (Australian National University) that an area 35km x 35km in length and width could actually power Australia's electricity requirements at the moment. In doing so, what sort of locations in Australia would you expect plants to make up that 35km x 35km to be located. Would it make up the north of the Great Diving Range in Victoria, west of New South Wales, what sort of areas?
Dr David Mills: Most of the people live in the east and that's the kind of location you would be looking at, so perhaps starting in Mt. Isa in Queensland, proceeding through Moree and Cobar and then down maybe to Mildura, that sort of region. That's prime solar site. The main issue is really grid access. If you have a large enough electricity grid line going to the place of interest, once you do, practically all that area is useful.
Matthew Wright: So, would you be a proponent of using the new high voltage DC technologies to bring the power more efficiently into consumers?
Dr David Mills: I would and certainly here in the United States without a doubt because here the solar energy is concentrated in the south west corner, that's the richest part, although you could generate all across the south of the country right to Florida. But there are large parts of the country in the north east where the sun isn't nearly strong enough for our purposes and it's much cheaper to generate in the sunny areas and have a long, high-voltage link to those areas. But, in Australia it's a somewhat different situation where you have the population on the coast, hugging the coast all the way around, and perhaps in each areas all you need is a straight line going inland until it gets sunny which might be much shorter than the equivalent United States link.
Matthew Wright: We've heard a lot of spin from our former federal government, and even some members of the new government, around hypothetical clean coal technologies and how Australia was going to shoot above its weight and be developing technologies that aren't yet here and exporting them to China. What's China like for these technologies and could we actually be using your expertise, the ANU's expertise, the expertise from Victoria, and exporting that to China?
Dr David Mills: We can. I've already been involved in an exercise with China through Sydney University and dealing with China with regard to IP and getting the royalties back is quite an issue. I think its still being worked out. Nevertheless, the resource situation in China clearly favours solar thermal far above any other resource. It's just like the United States. There's a large western desert and a concentration of the population in the east. The electricity grid is roughly the same size now, and so if you're going to build a very large installation, or series of installations in the United States, you could easily to so in China. Arguably, the need in China is more desperate and the local pollution is terrible and it is a big issue with the people there. So, we've had contact with people in China at a very high level and there is no doubt they want the technology but our issues are making sure it's fully developed before it goes there.
Matthew Wright: There's report being written by Professor Ross Garnaut in Australia. It's sort of like a mini-Stern Report and they're looking at the economics of climate change. Is it possible that a company like yours could contribute something to that report so that they can see that the costs are likely to be lower than hypothetical clean coal and that the Labor party can afford to actually go for the right kind of targets that are required to address catastrophic climate change that we are likely to be seeing?
Dr David Mills: We are in a market situation where there is not a lot of enthusiasm inside the company for actually giving figures to the public about potential costs, but we do state very clearly that it is our intention to compete with conventional coal and my guess is that it would happen in the United States in about the timeframe of 2011 roughly. We will probably get to the plant size where that's possible.
And conventional coal is cheaper by far than coal with sequestration. Coal with sequestration usually requires at least an advanced form of coal technology which happens to be actually more expensive than our solar plants and then on top of that there's the sequestration that's unproven.
So it's not just a costs argument. It's actually a validation that has to take place. Solar thermal's been proved for many years but nobody has successfully proven a coal sequestration plant. There are a lot of people who state in fact it doesn't work or has great dangers associated with it from leakage.
And the final thing is that by the time they get one operating which will be in 2020 and we really have to have a lot of capacity down by that time, so that's an inappropriate time to begin.
Matthew Wright: With the Labor party's announcement of $500 million, pretty much for 'from research to deployment' sort of funding around solar technologies; is that the sort of money that you guys could tap into to start concurrently working in Australia, and not just focus in the United States?
Dr David Mills: Yes. As we said we are already starting to get enquiries from Australia. Our smallest offering now is 175 megawatts and its square mile in terms of the units that they use here, about 2.5 square kms. That would probably cost around about $700m for just one plant. So, the difference that it makes to us is, it might be welcome especially the first plant in Australia, but I think you can see that if you're really serious about putting in a large amounts of capacity, we need something more than a one-off gift, if you will. There has to be some change in the structure of how you value clean energy.
Matthew Wright: Exactly. We'd hopefully encourage our government to take that on. We actually, at Beyond Zero Emissions, believe in taking all our sectors of the economy to near zero emissions beyond 2020 and then using a means like terra preta, which is an agrichar method to sequester carbon in soils, to actually draw down atmospheric carbon so the net result is that we start lowering our atmospheric carbon levels.
If the Australian government, and there'd be an international consensus around this, decided that this is really serious, we need to treat it like the end of slavery or the advance of the Nazis towards Great Britain, how quickly could your company ramp itself, could you envisage that, if you had to build thousands of megawatts of capacity, if you had to build 35km x 35km of capacity?
Dr David Mills: We are looking in that time frame at fairly similar figures. That doesn't phase us at all. But usually in larger countries. Because, what we have is a situation where even though the Earth is more important than anything, countries will resist taking recently installed infrastructure and suddenly root it out and put something new in. The cost to society would be very large and there would be serious problems about the availably of turbines for example. Right now there is a three year back up on the delivery of turbines. So, if we wanted to do that we would be sitting on our thumbs waiting for three years before we even start.
So, there are actually structural problems in trying to proceed beyond a certain range. That being said, I'm very much aligned with you in the need to move quickly. I just think we have to be a little bit realistic and say that might not take 10 years, but we could probably certainly do it in 20-30 as a continuous program. Even then it would be an aggressive program.
There are examples of this happening in the past in terms of the rate of technology change. There was a huge amount of gas combined cycle plant that we did from 1995 to 2005, especially in the United States. And the rates there are such that it is quite possible to imagine solar doing the same thing over about 20 years and changing over the entire mix, but only if the funding is available and only if society really wants it.
Matthew Wright: There's a very, very small scale pilot plant at the Liddell Power Station in NSW. Are there many sites like that that could be suitable? Then you won't have to worry about that problem of being able to get steam generators. If you could supplant most of the coal use, you could you use their existing steam generators, or are they not really that suitable?
Dr David Mills:They are not really that suitable. Liddell itself is an old plant and it would be hard to see it, I'd imagine, working beyond say 2015. So its going to be replaced anyway by something so you're better off replacing it with a new solar plant.
So, I don't think that's a particularly good example. I understand what you're saying, but the actual change over of existing plants, while we can make some changes, they're limited for a number of technical reasons. In the case of coal plants they use a completely different turbine than we do and operate at a different temperature range. We would have to use another kind of solar thermal technology to provide those kinds of temperatures, which is possible, which can be done.
When you look at the expansion of the electricity industry and the rate at which its expanding around the world, the first step is to stop that expansion in coal-fired capacity. That's the first thing to go for as fast as you can. And then, and yes, if we can put a few auxiliary solar plants around on existing coal plants to reduce the amount of coal, that's also a good thing to do. We will probably be doing that as a sub-strategy in the United States over the next year.
Matthew Wright: In terms of the technology itself, once you've done all of your R&D side, in terms of retooling and getting factories up and running for plant capacity to build reflectors, like manufacturing capacity, is that the sort of thing you can do in an African factory or is it like solar photo voltaic, like the solar cells we have on our roofs where it's almost computer technology? What's the manufacturing process? Is it that complicated?
Dr David Mills: No, it's not that complicated and it is able to be distributed around the Earth. I don't think there would be many countries were this couldn't be put in. In other words, you would ship a commodity like steel or glass to that site and from then on the manufacturing would take place. I think that's all right. We have a couple of special components such as coated tubes that we use for the absorbers which would have to come from a central site, but those are relatively small in the amount of material compared to the rest of the plant. Also the turbines have to be shipped for Germany or Japan or the United States, wherever they're made.
Matthew Wright: Also, you're an expert in optics. Next week we are hoping to speak to Wieslaw Maslowski whose from the United States Post Graduate Naval School and he's going to tell us how he expects the Arctic ice summer extent to be completely gone by 2013. That's four and a half million square kilometres of light. I'm not quite sure how much that reflects back out to the atmosphere, out to space, but I think its a high proportion above 80%. What do you think that heating load is like, given that you can run Australia's power on 35km x 35km of your solar troughs?
Dr David Mills: Are you saying that we would produce heat?
Matthew Wright: No, I'm saying that in terms of the sun no longer reflecting off the Arctic ice cap, because that's what the United States Post Graduate Naval School guy is saying...that we're going to lose that reflectivity. We're pulling a lot of heat into the globe, are we?
Dr David Mills: That's right. It will have a big effect. I mean, I can't see how you can avoid that effect except by producing some sort of cloud over the top to stop the beams from reaching the ocean in the first place. And so you can probably do a calculation fairly quickly on how much extra power that is, and that would undoubtedly be colossal.
We believe that just our solar collectors can power the United States grid in a space which is about 145km on a side, and that's enough to power the entire United States. I think you're talking about ice quantities or areas which are much higher than that, so these sorts of natural measures in nature dwarf anything that we do in terms of our technology.
Matthew Wright: So, in that case, and obviously you're on a mitigation side, will we bankrupt ourselves with that adaptation when you start looking at those sort of positive feedbacks and those sort of points that we're crossing in terms of going down towards dangerous climate change. Is it mitigation or adaption, and can you just go down the adaptation root like the previous Liberal Government was advocating?
Dr David Mills: No, I think that certainly we have to change our ways and the faster we do that the better. But what I, and probably nobody else knows, is it fast enough? Let's say we have a Marshall Plan for solar energy around the world and we install these things in 15 to 20 years. Is that actually fast enough, or is there going to be positive feedback which causes the temperature excursion anyway because of the pollution that's already gone into the atmosphere? I don't think anybody can quite answer that question yet. But if it did happen, it would be serious and if there were a mitigation strategy that could assist, a replacement strategy for conventional plant, then I guess I would be in favour of that otherwise we still have a problem.
Matthew Wright: Okay, we will have to leave it there. We thank you very much for joining us today and really appreciate it.
Dr David Mills:Pleasure.
Matthew Wright: We hope it was good for you as well.
Dr David Mills: My pleasure.
Matthew Wright: I think our listeners will be pretty interested in that and really keen to know that there is a solar technology out there that we can use to replace a lot of farms that are going to the wall that happen to be near the electricity grid, those farmers can know farm solar power, so that's really great.
Dr David Mills: In fact, our first plant in California is exactly that. Its land being sold by farmers for income. So, it's interesting that you say that. It seems to be a pattern that's emerging.
Matthew Wright: That's just fantastic and I think that the farmers will be really proud that their land is now being used valuably for society going forward rather than just abandoning it.
Matthew Wright: That was Dr. David Mills. He now works with Ausra, which is a company he founded and it's been great speaking to him and over to Scott.
Scott Bilby: If you would like to find out more about Ausra, you can visit their website at www.ausra.com
To find out more about issues relating to climate change you can visit us at beyondzeroemmissions.org
Matthew Wright: We are just about ready to say goodbye. I would encourage listeners to check by our website.
This week there has been some pretty amazing stuff. Obviously the whole paradigm has changed now. Before we were tackling a government in denial and now we're moving forward with a government that accepts climate change and is making it a centre piece. But what listeners have to realise is that the effort really starts now, the fight starts now, because this government's likely to put economics ahead of environment and if we keep going down adaptation route we will end up bankrupting ourselves so mitigation is really important here. Mitigation means jobs, it means jobs in solar technology, more jobs than coal gives us, it means healthy cities, healthy lifestyles because there is less airborn pollution, local pollution from cars and coal power plants, so I'd like everyone to get active, get engaged because that's what Beyond Zero Emissions is about. Whether it's joining your local climate change action group or coming in and helping us, we'd really appreciate your support.
Links for further reading
Study: Solar Thermal Power Could Supply Over 90 percent of U.S. Grid Plus Auto Fleet
Download Peer Reviewed Study
Download Slide Presentation of Study
Youtube Interview with Dr Mills
Youtube Presentation - John O'Donnell of Ausra, Inc. at Power Play workshop
John O'Donnell at Going Green 2007
Youtube - ABC 7:30Report Ausra - David Mills and Vinod Khosla
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