Good News 3 – Going Solar
We have a very hot neighbour. I am talking about the Sun, of course. To appreciate just how hot, one place to visit is Primm, Nevada. Primm is an unincorporated town on the Las Vegas Freeway, just over the border from California. It doesn’t have much to recommend it: three casinos, and a large outlet store. It does have a golf course, but that’s six miles south of the town, back in California. To the west of the town is the desert, leading up to Death Valley; to the east is more the same, leading into the Mojave Desert. But what makes you appreciate the heat of the sun is the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, close by the golf course. From the road you can see three huge arrays of mirrors, concentrating the sun’s rays on three power towers, each a thermal energy source creating steam to drive electricity generators. The tops of those three towers are bright, astonishingly bright, even though this is when seen from the road, and away from the mirrors’ focus (you can find some superb photographs on the web). There’s another solar power plant up the road, in Nevada, close to Primm: in this case using photovoltaic cells. Both plants generate massive quantities of clean electricity.
There are lots of ways of expressing just how much solar radiation reaches our planet, but the total energy hitting the Earth every hour is often expressed in watt-hours. As a reasonable approximation, this is 1.73 x 1017 watt-hours, or 173,000 terawatt hours (TWh), where 1 terawatt is 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) watts. To put that in perspective, the total energy consumed by humanity in 2017 was slightly less than this at 160,000 TWh, a figure that includes both the energy used to generate electricity, but also the amounts used for heating (burning firewood, coal, oil or gas), for transport (mainly petrol, diesel and aviation fuel), as well the energy used for industrial processes. To give another perspective, the total electricity used in 2017 was approximately 22,000 TWh, around one eighth of the amount arriving from the sun every hour! Solar energy does get mopped up in various ways, by photosynthesis and many other natural processes, but, clearly, there’s a lot going to waste.
What can we do to use this continuous flow of energy? For hundreds of years, one way to harness the never-ending stream of warming sunlight has been by using mirrors. In 1891, Clarence Kemp of Pasadena, California patented the world’s first home solar hot water device. It was a box, rather like the primitive heating systems many households used to put together for cooking, but in Kemp’s model the box was filled with water. Residents could use the water for washing up or to bathing. According to the California Solar Centre, ‘The Climax’, as it was called, was marketed towards ‘gentlemen’ whose wives had gone away on holiday, leaving them to do the household chores. This solar hot water was supposed to reduce the need to heat water with regular fuel. It proved very popular. By 1900, around 1,600 units had been installed across the southern areas of the state, with around one-third of all the households Pasadena having one. What a lot of lucky gentlemen!
Today two different ways are used to generate electricity from sunlight. As can be seen at Ivanpah, one is to concentrate the Sun’s rays with mirrors and use the resulting heat to produce steam to drive a turbine which in turn generates electricity. Alternatively, arrays of photovoltaic cells (more commonly known as solar panels) can convert sunlight directly into electricity. Solar panels are the most common way used to grab some of that solar energy today, and for many years the technology was an Australian success story. The first versions of Australian solar technology came from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). In 1941, its July bulletin reports that one of its employees had a device installed on his home that was estimated to be able to provide 300 days’ worth of hot water annually, warming up as much as 151 litres of water at a time.
Indeed, if solar energy is good news, so is the CSIRO. It’s unfashionable today to talk about large general purpose research establishments. The achievements of centres like Bell Labs seem consigned to history. But to ignore what happens when you give talented researchers the freedom to do their thing is to ignore how science works. Research isn’t only plugging away at a major project, with teams incrementally adding the data that will lead to a a major step forward. It is also about the idiosyncratic, chancy and rather Heath-Robinson world of offbeat researchers pursuing topics because they were fascinated. Good news can and does come from unpredictable individual science, slightly offbeat and driven people pursuing slightly crazy ideas because they could, and sometimes ending up with important outcomes.
The Australian Government’s involvement in scientific research has a long history. CSIRO can be traced back to the years following Federation and the First World War. In 1916 Prime Minister Hughes set up an Advisory Council of Science and Industry, which quickly evolved to become the Institute of Science and Industry in 1920. It wasn’t an easy start. There were challenges to obtaining funding as the new Commonwealth Government fought over funds with the States, and as war and economic challenges constrained the emerging nation. The first research investment was a partnership with the Queensland and New South Wales Governments to find ways to control the prickly pear pest that was invading millions of acres of agricultural land in eastern Australia, a good example of the research centre’s ongoing purpose to initiate and conduct scientific research to assist in the development of Australian industries, especially farming, mining and manufacturing in the early years. By 1926, funding began to increase, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) emerged, and the organisation grew rapidly, on the back of several early successes. Finally, the Act was changed once more in 1949 to form the CSIRO, as it continues today.
There’s a long list of major research achievements, from gene shears for wool to satellite land monitoring technologies, from radar to radio telescopes, from new treatments for highly infectious viruses such as influenza and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, (MERS), to the most comprehensive digital maps of Australian soils and landscapes yet produced, as well as key reviews of Australia’s biosecurity vulnerabilities, pollution from marine debris, and cybersecurity risks. Most important, CSIRO has been at the centre solar energy research.
It began with one of those rubber bands and sealing wax researchers, who back in 1941 had installed that rooftop tank at his home to collect hot water! Perhaps that was partly fun, but in 1953, believing Australia had no significant indigenous oil or natural gas deposits, the CRIRO’s Experimental Workshops changed from a service group to an engineering research and development team focused on areas of strategic significance, given Australia’s climate, its natural resources and its needs. Solar energy was put on the agenda, and within a year a prototype solar water heater had been built. The work drew on the study of ‘flat plate collectors’ at MIT, leading the CSIRO’s Roger Morse to publish a key paper, setting out the principles for designing of collectors, and the establishing basis for what would become the country’s leading and innovative solar water heater industry, as well as many patents.
Almost immediately, as research and development continued, commercial systems began to appear. In fact, SW Hart and Co Ltd, better known as Solahart, started making solar water heaters in 1953, and grew to become Australia’s largest manufacturer of these systems. Within 20 years it was exporting to 72 countries, with sales bringing in $70m. Its growth was a function of government collaboration with the private sector, and as production of solar water heaters had increased steadily during the 1960s, the Australian Government’s decision to install them on Government owned houses in the Northern Territory gave the industry a necessary boost to expand and develop their solar R&D and manufacturing facilities. By 1970, Darwin had become a well-known as a leading international example of the extensive use of domestic roof-top solar water heaters. Solahart’s success drew on collaboration, such as the practical development of selective surface coatings by Beasley Industries in conjunction with CSIRO, which gave Australian manufactures a technological advantage over overseas competitors. It wasn’t just domestic systems. Back in 1976 CSIRO, in a joint venture with Diverse Industries, installed the first solar panel system in Queanbeyan for warming cans in a Coca Cola bottling plant. Hot coke!
In 2016, in a celebration of 100 years of CSIRO, the development of solar hot water systems in 1953 was one of major 76 inventions listed on the 100 years of innovation website. It also appears on as one of 63 inventions listed on the rather improbably named Convict Creations Inventive Australian Mind website, along with Vegemite, the rotary Hills Hoist washing line, the bionic ear, and the wine cask. Ah, those inventive Aussies.
Solar energy is good news, but is it good enough? Driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas you see those two huge developments, but they are among several extraordinary projects already in place, while many others are being developed. The USA has its large plants, but increasingly it is India, China and the Middle East which lead the field. Three types of solar energy generating sites can be distinguished. First, there are solar plants, individual generating stations, run by a business or consortium, linked to the grid, most growing steadily on adjoining plots of land. Among these individual plants, China has three of the largest, with a 2.2 GW development in the semi-desert region of Gonghe County, in Qinghai, and two 1GW projects, one in Ninxia, the Yanchi Solar Park, and the other in Shaanxi, in the Datong Province. The other two plants in the top five are in Abu Dhabi, and in the USA. India’s top stand-alone plant comes in at #8.
However, when we turn to next category, solar parks, these first emerged in India and China, locations where several solar power plants could be sited together. The largest solar parks now house up to 80 individual solar power plants, and despite developments elsewhere, the list is still dominated by China and India. Located in the desert to the east of Golmud in Qinghai Province in China, Golmud Solar Park houses some 80 power plants with a total capacity of over 2.8 GW . It also includes both photovoltaic and ‘power tower’ plants, and its growth plans see it eventually generating 5 GW. China’s second huge park is alongside the Longyangxia Reservoir in Eastern Qinghai, operating in conjunction with a nearby hydro-electricity plant. It produces 2.4 GW. India has a growing generating centre at the Bhadla Solar Park, a massive development covering about 160 km2 at Bhadlachuhron Ki in the north of India’s Rajasthan state. It is planned to accommodate nearly 30 solar plants with a total capacity of 3.5 GW. A second Indian park in the top 5 is the Anantapur Ultra Mega Solar Park, covering some 90 km2 in Andhra Pradesh, India, scheduled for a total capacity of 1.5 GW. The last park in the top five is in Egypt. The Benban Solar Park covers 37 sq.km. in the desert in Egypt’s Aswan governorate, the only leading solar park outside Asia, generating 1.3 GW. Forgive all the numbers, but solar electricity is big, really big.
In other countries, notably the U.S., where the power market is more liberalized, solar projects also sometimes congregate together around the best locations, but without the formal coordination that solar parks offer, better described as ‘solar clusters’. Like solar parks, these clusters can be massive. Currently the largest is in the arid region of Phalodi, in India’s Jodhpur district. With some 90 plants, this cluster has with a combined capacity of some 6.6GW – about the same as the national totals for France or Australia. It is expected to grow to 8 GW. The next largest is in Gonghe, China, with plants taking the total capacity of this cluster to 5.1 GW.
It appears the cluster approach is best suited to less densely populated regions of countries with high energy consumption. It can be expected to spread to parts of South America, Australia, and southern Africa. So, where is Australia? A report in the Sydney Morning Herald on 22 August this year announced that a $22 billion solar farm backed by billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest to supply Darwin and Singapore with power is about to get even larger. Sun Cable is said to be planning a “significantly bigger” solar farm than the 14Gw plant presently under development in northern Australia, to supply clean energy to the Top End and south-east Asia. By the end of 2028, the company is aiming to have three gigawatts of readily dispatchable power and meet as much as 15 per cent of Singapore’s electricity needs via a 3750-kilometre underwater cable.
It’s about time. From being in the vanguard years ago, Australia’s development into building large-scale wind and solar plants has been slowing, with only three new projects currently at a financial commitment stage, intended to add 432 megawatts, about the size of one coal-fired power station. Despite losing its early lead, however, solar energy for Australia has to be a source of good news for the future. The energy falling on a solar farm covering 50 kilometres by 50 kilometres would be sufficient to meet all of Australia’s electricity needs. By contrast, burning all of Australia’s coal, oil, gas, uranium and other non-fossil fuels would provide a little more than one-tenth of the amount of solar energy Australia receives every year for free. CSIRO is in the centre of this. To improve the efficiency of Sun Cable’s proposed giant solar farms, it has teamed up with the University of NSW’s Australian Centre for Advanced Solar Photovoltaics (ACAP) and CSIRO. Improvements are needed: solar farms use photovoltaic cells capable of converting about 20 per cent of the radiation into electricity, while new rooftop solar units are reaching efficiency levels of about 24 per cent. Researchers believe a 30 per cent rate by 2030 is possible. Australia’s on the case.
Going solar must be a key path to reducing the rate of global warming, and to replacing our reliance on fossil fuels. It’s not the only technology, of course. Wind has a major contribution to make. Even geothermal energy can be utilised. Indeed, there’s a new facility to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in Hellisheidi, Iceland, using an emerging technology that could play an important role in reducing greenhouse gases. The carbon capturing plant, perched on a barren lava plateau in south-west Iceland uses fans to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, capturing it in spongelike filters. The filters are heated to free the gas, which is mixed with water and pumped deep into underground basalt caverns, where it cools down and turns into dark-grey stone. The installation was built in Iceland because it has ample supplies of climate-friendly geothermal energy and just the right underground geology to help capture carbon. Sounds a little crazy, but it works: more good news!
For centuries, scientists and cranks have dreamt of perpetual motion machines, machines that can work indefinitely without an external energy resource. Logic tells us such a machine is impossible, it would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Machines that extract energy from finite sources can’t continue for ever, as the energy stored in the source will eventually be exhausted. Solar energy technologies sometimes seem to avoid that limitation: like Norman Lindsay’s ‘magic pudding’, you can keep on taking and there’s always more. Of course, the sun will burn out one day, but that’s one eventuality we can set aside for a very long time. For now and for a long time, going solar is great news.
