Heat from the sun will soon be providing electricity for homes in rural and regional Australia, 24 hours a day, if an experimental solar thermal generator designed by scientists and engineers at the Australian National University proves successful. Murrumburrah is part of the project.

A series of 500 square metre collecting dishes each about 27 metres across are being built. They developed from a prototype built in 1994, and will focus the sun’s rays to generate superheated steam. The steam will drive a turbine that connects to an electricity generator, converting sunlight into power that can feed into the electricity grid.

Russell Muirhead of Muirhead Engineering in Murrumburrah, with the assistance of Ken Pearsall, is fabricating 150 steel struts to support the collecting dishes. Each strut is a different size, to match the shape of the parabolic dish. David McCready from the ANU and Mark Gledhill from Wizard Power visited Murrumburrah recently to inspect progress with the exacting work.

Even better, the process will ensure that energy is available 24 hours a day. An ammonia dispersion cycle uses heat to split ammonia into nitrogen and hydrogen, and store it after the sun has gone. Recombining the elements releases sufficient heat to make steam for generating electricity at night or on cloudy days.

‘Our ‘Big Dish’ technology is designed for use in regional and remote areas, especially places where there is plenty of sunlight and little risk of damage from hail’, said the project manager, David McCready from the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science. ‘The Big Dish doesn’t just generate electricity. The technology can be applied in desalination, sewerage treatment and water purification, so it has many potential uses in remote areas’, he added.

The ‘Big Dish’ is the world’s largest high performance parabolic dish solar thermal concentrator. It can concentrate the sun’s rays 1,500 times to produce temperatures of over 1,200 degrees C. Combined with the ammonia energy storage system, it can store energy until it is needed to generate electricity, at any time of the day or night.