DESERTEC COMMENTARY:
Why Not Cover the Woomera Prohibited Area with Mirrors?

California's Kramer Junction concentrating solar power plant has been generating clean, green base load energy for the US West Coast grid for 20 years now. The Woomera Prohibited Area is completely moribund. Just a fraction of this huge, pancake flat area covered with solar mirrors could provide electricity to ALL of Australia.

Things have been rather slow at Woomera since the European space industry moved on in the 1960s. The town is dying out, and there just in't enough leading-edge war business to keep the Woomera Rocket Range ticking over. Until now, that is.

With high energy prices, global conflict over oil and the urgent problem of climate change now in the front of everyone’s minds – Woomera could look forward to a new lease on life. How? As a major solar energy power plant in the war on climate change. Woomera has everything: sun, flat terrain, power line and road infrastructure and a service town crying out for new industry.

Concentrating solar power is “clean energy from deserts.” It's generated by reflecting and concentrating the sun’s rays using mirrors to create steam to drive traditional turbines. A 700-kilometer square solar field in Outback Australia, the American southwest or the North African desert could power the entire world. That’s how big the resource is.

But first, think "small." And that's where Woomera could come in.

According to the CSIRO, a concentrating solar power mirror field 50-kilometers square would be enough to power all Australia. There's multiples of that sitting idle at the Woomera Rocket Range. And it's very close to power line infrastructure. To make way for the solar age, the occasional rocket launches from Woomera could be relocated further west to, say, Tarcoola. This would open the way for the eastern part of the range to be used for renewable energy generation.

Concentrating Solar Power mirrors
at the CSIRO's Newcastle solar research center
 The vast Woomera Prohibited Area has plenty of room for both rockets and solar power
The eastern part of the range is located near power line infrastructure and an ideal service town in Woomera

Readily available power line infrastructure passing by Woomera could allow electricity to be carried south to the Upper Spencer Gulf or be used by the expanding Olympic Dam mine. Indeed, the existing power line infrastructure stretching up to Olympic Dam could provide an ideal interconnection point for a series of concentrating solar power plants located along the eastern boundary of the Woomera Prohibited Area.

Concentrating solar power is the energy source of tomorrow, and it's available today. For its part, Australia has the sun, the land, the power lines and the service towns to provide huge amounts of clean, green solar energy at rapidly falling prices.

Australia already is home to a series of companies and university research programs seeking to commercialise concentrating solar power. These range from solar dishes to concentrating solar towers to parabolic troughs to concentrating solar photovoltaics to solar chimneys. What better way to build up a clean, green 21st Century industry that to create a world-leading industrial park on the Woomera Rocket that could become a global research laboratory for solar thermal innovation. The rest of the world would beat a path to our door. They may even buy our power.

Woomera high Sun
Woomera is an area of very high insolation The gutted remnants of Woomera's Launchpad 6A, once the
center of the world's space industry. Australia can now
use this same land to take the lead in the coming
solar revolution.