Thursday, January 26, 2017

Revisiting Australia's ground-breaking first commercial solar power plant at White Cliffs

The ABC has a look back at Australia's first commercial solar thermal power plant, at White Cliffs in NSW - Revisiting Australia's ground-breaking first commercial solar power plant at White Cliffs.
Located about 250 kilomtres east of Broken Hill, the $1.9 million plant generated electricity from 1982 until 2005, using two different technologies.

Initially, the solar thermal power station concentrated the sun's energy to produce steam from water which was used to drive a steam engine/generator system. In 1997 it was transformed using the latest photovoltaic (PV) technology, with the cells directly converting the concentrated sunlight to electricity.