John Howard's Carbon Trading Taskforce Gets It Wrong on Concentrating Solar Power

The Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading -- quite simply -- got it wrong on concentrating solar power.

PM Taskforce Graphic
The taskforce overstated concentrating solar power's cost by anywhere from 20% to 250%

In its summary of new electricity generating technologies, the task force says concentrating solar power -- which it lumps into the broad area of 'solar thermal' -- is still at the "demonstration/prototype" stage with commercial applications not expected for 5-10 years.

Oh? In California, 354MW of concentrating solar power capacity has been churning out energy since the late 1980s. That's longer than many of Australia's current coal-fired power plants have been around. No one calls Australia's coal-fired power plants "demonstration/prototype."

In Nevada, a 64MW concentrating solar power plant called Nevada Solar One has just opened on a commercial basis. No one calls that project a "demonstration/prototype."

Elsewhere in California, a company called Stirling Solar is considering a 900MW concentrating solar power dish farm. And in Spain, a 50MW commercially-run concentrating solar power capacity should be open by 2008.

Concentrating solar power is now so attractive that Peter Darbee, chairman of Pacific Gas & Electric, the huge California electricity utility, told a financial analysts conference in New York during April that he sees solar thermal -- currently costing US7-8c per kwh (A8.3-9.52c per kwh) as "exceedingly exciting."

This is cost that's backed up by other material in the PM's taskforce report, in which "solar thermal" is estimated to cost around A8.5-9c per kwh. This is right in line with some prices for carbon capture and storage when carbon is properly priced.

The big difference, though, is that concentrating solar power is a proven technology. It has real, verifiable prices. Carbon capture and storage is a still-fictitious technology with no real world deployment and no real prices.

PM Taskforce
Concentrating solar power, a proven technology, is already price competitive with some cost
estimates of carbon capture and storage -- an uproven technology
Source: Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading, page 131

Concentrating solar power also is a technology that's now on a steep downward price trajectory. This is thanks to the "Learning Curve." The learning curve is the renewable energy industry's equivalent of "Moore's Law" in technology.

Every day that goes by, entrenched innovation and progress in concentrating solar power means that prices are dropping. The first commercial parabolic trough concentrating solar power plants were built in California in the mid 1980s. Back then, they produced power at roughly US35c/kwh. In seven short years, that price fell by half. Unfortunately, low energy prices during the 1990s led to a lost decade of complacency in renewable energy.

The high energy prices of the last few years, along with greenhouse gas fears, have changed all that. Now, a new wave of deployment of CSP plants is benefiting from accumulated advances, sparking a new round of price reductions that should bring concentrating solar power down even further in price in coming years.

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister's taskforce missed all this. Instead, it lumped a proven, low cost technology with speculative, early-stage, unproven technologies such as carbon capture and storage and next generation nuclear.