Solar power: we ain’t seen nothing yet by Giles Parkinson

When Mark Twidell was a senior executive at BP Solar in the mid 2000s, his team put together a forecast for Australian PV deployment of 200MW by 2010. “We thought we were dreaming,” he says. And it may have appeared so, because BP Solar was later to close what was then the country’s only PV manufacturing facility, only for it to be reopened and then closed again by another party.

Mark Twidell this week steps down as head of the Australian Solar Institute – which is being absorbed into the Australian Renewable Energy Agency - after an extraordinary three years of industry development. Already, more than 2,000MW of solar PV has been installed in Australia – mostly on household rooftops. That has engaged the public, and their wallets, but the more significant work has been occurring away from the public eye.

The ASI was originally formed to provide $100 million of government funding support for R&D in Australian solar technologies. But, alongside ARENA, it has actually deployed $180 million and leveraged a total R&D solar portfolio of more than $450 million, supported by more than 100 local and leading international organisations.

This includes two crucial announcements made just last week that will lock in eight years of funding in two key streams – solar PV and concentrated solar power (CSP) – that will pool the efforts of Australia’s best research institutions.

Twidell ends his tenure at the ASI this week. We caught up with him to discuss some of the highs and lows of the Australian solar industry in the last few years, where the opportunities lie, and which technology developments should we watch out for in the future:

Australian R&D leadership

Twidell says Australian solar R&D remains among the best in the world, and it is without doubt a leader in solar PV. But he argues that one of the best ways to leverage this R&D is to create what he describes as an “industrial-scale pilot production line” in Australia.  This means that Australian IP will not have to chase production lines overseas, where Australia may have less control over its IP. Instead, Australia should encourage international groups to beat a path to Australia’s institutions to trial and keep up with the latest research and developments.  A line equivalent to a 50MW plant should do the trick – and he says this will be something for  ARENA to consider if the right partnership structure can be arranged with industry and research players.

The highs

Unexpectedly, Twidell cites the much criticised, and ultimately disbanded, Solar Flagships program as one of the highs. The ASI was charged as the knowledge sharing agent for that program, and despite the inability of the flagships program to actually get anything built, Twidell says it still produced a huge amount of unseen value in discoverable data on the decline in PV costs, for instance, which in turn was crucial in helping form views in the Energy White Paper, which finally recognized the potential of solar’s contribution to the country’s energy mix.