Power Tools

With a large number of solar energy power plants turning up these days, it is no wonder that it can get pretty competitive. Ausra Solar Heat and Power, the Australian-American company, however, has managed to stand above the crowd.

Based in Palo Alto, California, the company got its name from an ancient Indo-European goddess of the dawn. Ausra is a solar thermal technology company, which focuses on producing electricity from sunlight that could lower the cost of generating utility-scale power with less complexity, unlike its rivals. This makes Ausra one of the premier alternative energy companies.

What solar thermal power plants do is to capture heat from the sun and then use it to power turbines to generate electricity. Ausra uses inexpensive flat plate mirrors that are approximately 4-feet-long called Fresnel reflectors. These reflectors will focus the sun’s rays directly on water pipes which will boil the water to run the steam turbines that will then generate electricity.

With concentrated solar power plants, trough-like structures are used which have curved mirrors focusing the sunlight onto the tubes of oil. The heat from the oil is then used to make steam that will drive the electricity-generating turbine.

The system used may help to reduce the solar power-generated electricity expenses. The Fresnel reflectors of Ausra tend to be flat, unlike the curved and finely tuned mirrors of the conventional trough design.

Ausra Solar Heat and Power uses a system that also heats water directly to generate steam compared to the more traditional systems wherein they first heat the oil to generate heat. This may have caused Ausra to be less efficient at converting solar energy into electricity.

Founded in 2002, the Solar Heat and Power in Australia was originated by David Mills in the early 1990s at Sydney University. Graham Morrison helped Mills to develop it from 1995 to 2001.

Now known as Ausra, the Ausra Solar Heat and Power built a one-megawatt pilot project in Australia for the Macquarie Generation in 2004 at South Wales. The company then moved to the United States in February and is currently working on a second 38-megawatt capacity power plant that would be finished by 2009. Ausra has also begun construction of a 6.5-megawatt power plant in Portugal and also has plans to build a 180-megawatt plant in the United States.