Oz-made 200kW CSPV pilot plant unveiled in Victoria, first of its kind

Melbourne-based concentrated solar PV technology developer Raygen unveiled its pre-commercial CSPV power tower plant in the Victorian town of Newbridge on Friday – the first in the world to combine high efficiency solar cells with low-cost heliostat collector systems.

The $3.6 million pilot project, which received $1.7 million in funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, is fully operational, grid connected and will supply 200 kilowatts to a local agriculture business.

RayGen’s unique and highly efficient CSPV technology uses an array of sun-tracking heliostat mirrors to focus sunlight onto a central receiver, which converts a high proportion of sunlight to power, while an advanced cooling system keeps it from overheating.

The technology is powered by advanced semiconductor devices produced locally, in Melbourne, with the remainder of the system manufactured in-market where the system is deployed.

This approach has enabled significant scaling up of production at low cost – an advantage RayGen says will allow its technology to produce electricity at half the cost of competing technologies.

In 2014, the company won the Energy Technology Award and the inaugural People’s Choice Award at the Australia Technologies Competition, and the grand prize at the interntational CleanTech Cluster Association Awards in Switzerland, beating a field of more than 10,000 cleantech companies.

RayGen is also working on a storage option, although CEO Bob Cart says that storage is not necessarily needed in markets such as China where demand is soaring – and where RayGen intends on building a 10MW system by 2016, on the back of a deal with China Intense Solar.

To this end, the unveiling of the plant on Friday was accompanied by the signing of a MoU with RayGen’s commercial partner, Juye Solar, for an additional capital investment of $6 million.

The funding injection will enable RayGen to boost its manufacturing capacity, after which time Juye Solar will invest a further $15 million for the development of RayGen’s China offering.

Speaking at the launch of the pilot plant, ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said the project’s completion marked a significant milestone, and would help advance a more affordable and flexible energy future for Australia.

“The pilot plant is providing data on performance, reliability, operations and maintenance that can be used for the development of a commercial scale CSPV system,” Frischknecht said.

“These outcomes will be shared with the broader energy industry to help break down the barriers that are facing the advancement of CSPV.

“There are also links with the ARENA-supported record-breaking ‘Power Cube’ that achieved more than 40 per cent efficiency last year and was developed by the University of New South Wales in collaboration with RayGen,” he said.

“With further development, RayGen could potentially take the PowerCube technology from the laboratory into the field for future CSPV plants.”