Start-up Ausra thinks big with solar storage
AUSTIN, Texas--When most people think of solar energy they think of panels on people's homes. But if you follow the money, investors are betting that large-scale solar from companies like Ausra are the most cost-competitive.
Ausra, which presented at the Clean Energy Venture Summit here on Tuesday, is testing a system to generate power at centralized stations. These solar parks use concentrating solar power to create steam that turns a turbine to make electricity.
If constructed on a large enough scale,these solar thermal plants are already cost-effective when compared with fossil-fuel power generation, according to advocates of the approach. (See photo of another concentrating solar plant here.)
Ausra's twist is "thermal storage." In addition to generating steam from its array of special metal tubes, Ausra stores hot water that a power plant can draw on during times when the sun is not shining.
That thermal storage is key to competing on price even at peak demand times, said Robert Morgan, the chief development officer of Ausra, who spoke on Tuesday.
The company's system, which is now testing in Australia, can operate at 10 cents per kilowatt hour for plants between 100 and 200 megawatts. For plants between 100 and 500 megawatts, the cost goes down to 8 cents per kilowatt hour, said Morgan
That means they can compete with existing natural gas plants, which operate at 12 cents per kilowatt hour, he said.
"With thermal storage, we can compete with coal on price," he said. Coal-fueled plants are typically the cheapest sources of power.
Ausra, which has been relatively quiet about its plans until now, is backed by venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
encourages practical innovation. This is the second Australian company that has produced a technology that makes wind turbines seem the antiquated, non-dispatchable, uncontrollable, impotent and costly power source they really are.
First was Enviromission with their solar tower
concept, which may come to fruition this year, and now the Ausra solar thermal reflector array system whose genius is in the engineering, so to speak, whereby cheap components produced en masse promises to harvest enormous amounts of power that
can be completely controlled to match up with demand. Those "miilion solar roofs" that California spent so much money on now appear a BIG mistake. That money should have waited for a practical technology like Ausra has delivered, and perhaps the California electric customer wouldn't have to pay the highest rates in the nation. I thinks it's enlightening that South Carolina, with plenty of nuclear power, produces roughly the same levels of carbon emissions per megawatt that California does (when external coal produced electricity shipped into California is taken into account) yet So Carolina electrical rates are not half those of the "Golden State." Now we know why they call it golden - electricity is worth its weight in gold there.
If we look at the 30 year life cycle costs for a new coal plant that will operate in a carbon-taxed economy you will discover that a 1600 megawatt plant will require at least 16 billion dollars (cost of construction, coal supply, rail shipping, water, carbon taxation or sequestration) for its life cycle operation,while an equivalent 30 year production from an existing parabolic trough solar plant will cost about $8 billion. AUSRA's CLFR technology potentially can be even more economical. Is it any wonder that there are more than 50 new coal plants on hold in the US because capital markets will not provide financing for them because they are two uneconomical and risky?