Vast unveils new power tower – the “last bit of gear” for Australia’s first big solar thermal plant

Australia’s Vast Renewables has completed a first-of-its-kind concentrated solar thermal power (CSP) receiver tower, one of the final components of what will be Australia’s first large scale solar thermal project to be built and tested at operational scale.

The innovative technology, designed and manufactured in Goodna, Queensland, will be deployed as part of the 30 MW Port Augusta Green Energy Hub with eight hours of storage (240 MWh) in South Australia’s Port Augusta, and an accompanying solar methanol plant.

The solar thermal part of the project, also known as VS1, has received $65 million in funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency in an agreement announced by federal energy minister Chris Bowen in early 2023.

Vast announced in December it had signed an updated funding agreement to access up to $30 million of its existing Arena grant to support green technology manufacturing and project development activities.

Vast CEO Craig Wood says the completion of the receiver tower, pictured above at Vast’s Goodna facility, is “the last of the bits of gear” that needed to be built and tested ahead of achieving financial close on the project later this year.

“This is really just the last of the validation tests,” Wood told Renew Economy on Tuesday.

“For many years now we’ve been validating each of the components of the technology… All of these sort of normal tests that any of this equipment needs to be put through in order to establish performance at a level of reliability that’s required.

“This is … the last of those tests that we need to kick off to make sure that everyone is comfortable before we pull the trigger and move forward.”

Once the technology is proved out, it will be deployed at utility-scale at VS1 to deliver energy into the national grid and – eventually – to partly power a world-first co-located renewable methanol production facility, producing green fuel for shipping.

Wood says the green methanol part of the project is still a work in progress – the pre-front end engineering design (pre-FEED) process has been completed and optimisation is now underway – but it holds great promise for co-location with solar thermal.

“If you believe these green fuels are going to be required, and we do, then the vast interest in that is actually as the provider of the primary energy, because the way in which we can provide that energy as a combination of both dispatchable power and heat makes the outputs significantly cheaper,” he tells Renew Economy.

But it is Vast’s tower technology that is the core innovation of the Nasdaq-listed company’s take on solar thermal power; modular and repeatable with a simple supply chain, it allows rapid, on-site construction and straightforward commissioning. The design also reduces energy losses and has limited moving parts to deliver reliable long-term performance.  

“If you look at the current state-of-the-art in solar thermal around the world, it’s these giant central tower receivers,” Wood says.

“You’re talking about 250 meters tall. And the solar receiver on the top of them is, generally speaking, a 40 or 50 meter massive structure – and the construction of those is bespoke.

“You’ve got, effectively, a skyscraper foundation to build, then you build 200 meters of skyscraper with no windows, and then you drop 1000 tons of steel on the top, and all the work to actually finish it off in terms of… piping and instrumentation and installation and commissioning … has to happen 200 meters up in the air.

“What our system does is it eliminates all of those things. …It’s assembled on the ground and then lifted into place. We could build a tower and stand it up in four days… So it’s just orders of magnitude more simple,” Wood says.

“The supply chain is much easier because it’s just flat-packed galvanised steel. Construction is much easier; commissioning is easier… and then the fact that it’s modular means that, once we’re operating the plant, if we have a problem with one of the smaller towers, we can turn that one off and keep operating.”

Vast’s patented technology is also designed and made in Australia.

“By harnessing Australia’s abundant natural resources, our projects aim to spark the growth of a domestic CSP industry while creating export opportunities to deliver Australian green technology to clean energy projects worldwide,” Wood said in a statement on Tuesday.

“We’re proud of the breakthroughs we’ve achieved, and the immense potential our technology has to play a vital role in the world’s decarbonisation efforts.”