CleanTechTV™ tells the world about Australia’s cleantech companies in a way that attracts investment, deals, partnering and licensing to drive the growth of this sector and Australia’s next wave of innovation.

At CleanTechTV™, we talk to our cleantech leaders – any time, any where – as they make international news around the world. CleanTechTV™ is the first to offer real time web-based interviews on the Australian cleantech sector.

We use the latest in online video technology so your news message gets out fast.

WHO is on CleanTechTV™?

CleanTechTV™ features tech leaders speaking about their company and service/offering in an interview format with leading cleantech reporters Giles Parkinson [The Australian, Business Spectator and more] and Brad Howarth [BRW, BOSS, AFR and more].

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WHAT will being featured on CleanTechTV™ do for our company?

The interviews can be re-purposed, downloaded and embedded easily for corporate websites, e-newsletters, presentations, video business cards, email, conferences and more.

Each time an executive appears on CleanTechTV™ it launches a sophisticated content sharing campaign ensuring strong and targeted pick-up in Australia and around the globe.

CleanTechTV™ allows your company to access “The Underutilized Power Of The Video Demo To Explain What The Hell You Actually Do”

“I don’t know all the secrets to building a successful company, but there are a few things I’ve seen that seem like surefire ways to ever-so-slightly grease the road to success. Here’s an easy one: make a video demo and prominently promote it somewhere where new visitors can find it. One that shows off the core function of your product without making people think they’re watching an ad or a pitch. And answer, as thoroughly as possible in 2-3 minutes, what it is that you’re bringing to the table.”

Tech Crunch: by Jason Kincaid October 2009

For more info about CleanTechTV™ contact us at:

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John Grimes speaks of the record number of delegates that have come to the conference as well as the great speakers and leaders who are there to present papers and speak on the importance of solar energy. The technology is available today to be deployed, says John Grimes. “We can transform both electricity generation of Australia, and build a really strong and vibrant solar industry.”

We interview delegates, researchers and speakers attending the conference, in a series of vox pops, we ask delegates, to ask them why they see Solar2010 as a must attend event and what they hope will come from the conference.

Featured in this video:

* Dr David Mills, Solar Thermal Expert – presenting cutting-edge research into powering the US on solar and wind

* Larry Kazmerski, US Solar Ambassador from National Renewable Energy Laboratory – presenting at the conference and there to build on existing partnerships with the Australian solar community and make new “solar friends.”

* Benjamin Sovacool, National University of Singapore – presenting their research projects on how to design policies that promote renewables & identifying the best practice on how to deploy energies.

* Matthew Wright, Beyond Zero Emissions – explains his research, showing how we can decarbonise our economy and talks of his hopes for positive policy outcomes stemming from the conference which will promote the continued growth of the Australian solar industry.

* Professor Ken Baldwin, Australian National University – speaks of the new formation of the ANU energy change institute, which is described as an “umbrella organization” brining together all the research activities, including the expertise the ANU has on economics, the carbon trading schemes, the policies legalities relating to energy, as well as the whole spectrum of social sciences.

Visit the AuSES website to find out more.

Australian policy makers show no signs of tiring from their unflinching belief in centralised power stations.

The article, ‘The new pillars of power’, looks at alternatives to this belief.

Giles cites the recent announcement by the City of Sydney Council to generate its own power through mini-gas power plants. The plan is explored in detail in our recent blog, ‘Mini power plants: making a big difference’.

‘The new pillars of power’ then goes on to further explore Dr. David Mills’ research which suggests that the need for baseload power has expired. Dr. Mills presented his research at the Australian Solar Energy Society’s (AuSES) ‘Solar2010′ Conference in Canberra on the 1st of December.  Giles explains Dr. Mills’ research:

The study that Mills has completed with Weili Cheng and Phillippe Larochelle found that wind and solar could have covered – on an hour by hour basis – the entire electrical load for the US in 2006. No baseload required.

Mills gave further details on how this would work in his keynote address in Canberra on Wednesday night at the Australian Solar Energy Society’s conference, expanding on his idea of replacing the concept of baseload and peaking power with a new system based around flexible and inflexible energy mechanisms.

In Mills’ view, the task is to match higher-cost flexible technologies with lower-cost inflexible technologies, and in doing so he challenges the accepted view of energy sources by lumping  wind and solar PV in the same category as coal, gas and nuclear.

“The components in each of these two buckets – inflexible technologies and flexible technologies – must compete in price with each other, not with elements from the other bucket. They do different jobs,” he says.

‘The new pillars of power’ includes some of Dr. Mills’ diagrams to help explain his conclusion that “baseload is no longer a relevant prerequisite for a modern generating system.”

Giles Parkinson’s original exclusive pre-conference interview article with Dr. David Mills: ‘Is baseload power necessary?’

Read: ‘The new pillars of power’ for follow up coverage.

The new power plants will initially be powered by gas, but have the potential to utilise forms of biogas. The SMH article explains:

Sydney will become the first Australian city to start weaning itself off coal-fired electricity, with the business district and much of the inner city preparing to switch to small, gas-driven power plants in the next 20 years.

The City of Sydney master plan, to be published today by the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, will identify 15 “low carbon zones” based on trigeneration plants that create electricity and also generate heat and cold for airconditioning.

The switch could save up to $1.5 billion in state government spending on new infrastructure for bringing power from coal-fired plants, a report commissioned by the council said.

This innovative plan is part of the City of Sydney’s aim to make the city centre carbon neutral by 2050.

The full article can be read on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald. It is also available online here.

The plan is further explained in ‘People try to put him down, but he’s just talkin’ about trigeneration’, also published in The Sydney Morning Herald today. The article by Nicky Phillips, explains how the City of Sydney could utilise Sydney’s industrial past. Unlike our “primitive past”, however, this new plan would not sacrifice health and the environment for growth and development. Phillips writes:

Allan Jones is the man Sydney council has hired to turn its Sustainable Sydney plans, under which the city would produce 100 per cent of its energy locally within 20 years, into reality.

”Doing a Woking” is how people in the industry describe Jones’s task, a reference to the small city in Surrey, England, that he took off the grid to produce 98 per cent of its own electricity.

As in that town, Jones wants to install a series of trigeneration plants throughout Sydney, which would produce 360 megawatts of power combined that would not only be greener but also cheaper than electricity from coal-fired power stations.

Trigen’s main draw card is efficiency. Using generators slightly bigger than a car motor, a trigen plant can simultaneously produce power, heat and cooling from a single fuel source – thus the name.

The article goes on to describe the various ways this plan would save power:

Coal-fired power stations, which supply most of Sydney’s electricity, lose up to two-thirds of the energy that goes into making electricity as heat, he says. In trigen this heat is not wasted. Instead it is captured and used to warm buildings or sent through a device called an absorption chiller to form cold water that can be used in air-conditioning, which accounts for about 60 per cent of the city’s present energy consumption.

Unlike coal-fired power stations, which are located outside big cities to be close to cheap and plentiful coal sources, trigen plants are placed within the city, often in building basements. They can supply heat, cooling and power to a single dwelling or group of buildings, called precincts.

With the electricity having to travel a shorter distance from the source to the end user, energy usually lost through transmission wires is also conserved.

The full article can be found here.

Read the AuSES Solar2010 Conference program at:
http://www.auses.org.au/conference/

Dr David Mills, Solar Thermal Expert

Dr David Mills
Solar Thermal Expert, Founder of Ausra (now owned by Areva) and Guest Speaker at AuSES Solar2010 Conference

David Mills was born in Canada and lives in Sydney, Australia. He is known worldwide for pioneering Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) technology in the early 1990’s and for many publications in non-imaging optics, solar thermal energy, concentrating PV , and solar energy policy since 1977.  He rose to become the head of the solar energy group at the University of Sydney School of Physics, and originated the research  programme that developed the double cermet evacuated tube absorber surface used by tens of millions of households in China.

He  is a former president of the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) and was the inaugural Chair of the International Solar Cities Initiative (ISCI).  Mills was a co-founder of Solsearch, the company that first performed research on the CLFR, co-founder of Solar Heat and Power (SHP) that built the Liddell solar array, Australia’s largest solar thermal plant, and the first CSIRO tower heliostat field.  He was subsequently co-founder of Ausra Inc. In California, which built Kimberlina,  the first commercial solar thermal electricity plant in that State in 20 years.   At Ausra in Palo Alto,  he served as first Board Chairman and led long term research in his capacity as CSO, working on advanced solar collector and thermal storage systems which continue under long term development.  Ausra’s subsidiary Ausra Pty Ltd. (formerly SHP, and now Areva Pty. Ltd.) successfully bid for the 44 MW Kogan Creek plant to be operated by CS Energy.  After Ausra was successfully sold to Areva in early 2010,  he retired in June and returned to Australia in August.

In 2009, he became the first Veski Entrepreneur in Residence, and delivered the Deakin Lecture in October. During this time he was honored by dinners with the State Governor and the Executive Staff of the University of Melbourne.  He is married to Karina Kelly, a well-known former TV science reporter and newsreader from Australia, and they have two sons aged 18 and 13.

About AuSES Solar2010 Conference

Solar2010 Conference
Hosted by Australian Solar Energy Society (AuSES).
December 1st-3rd
Manning Clark Theatre
Australian National University
Canberra

To find out more about the AuSES Solar2010 conference, register or download the conference program visit:
http://www.auses.org.au/conference/

For all media enquiries regarding the Solar2010 Conference and guest speakers please contact:
Susan Fitzpatrick-Napier
Click here to email
+61 (02) 9006 1614

His very public intervention pressures the government on two fronts: not to cede ground to the Greens and independents who wish to revisit the fundamentals of the mining tax; and to take more decisive action on climate change in the wake of Labor dropping its emissions trading scheme and the fiasco of the proposed citizens’ assembly. …
Mr Kloppers’s call for a carbon tax undermines the passionate objections of Tony Abbott to setting a price on carbon before there is a global consensus. …
“Carbon emissions need to have a cost impact in order to cause the consumer and companies to change behaviour and favour low-carbon alternatives” [said Mr Kloppers at Australian British Chamber of Commerce lunch in Sydney]
“We all recognise this is a politically charged subject. No government relishes telling people that things need to cost more.”
Mr Kloppers argued for a revenue-neutral carbon tax, insisting that the government must not treat any income as windfall revenue but return it to companies and individuals and “let the market work”.

Giles Parkinson, from Climate Spectator, has written a great story entitled “Kloppers’ big call“:

There can be no doubting now that a carbon price is back on the political agenda. Big business – or, more to the point, the biggest business – has spoken, and there is now no hiding from the issue.
BHP Billiton CEO Marius Kloppers certainly made a dramatic intervention into the debate. He took three three pillars of the fossil fuel lobby’s defence of the status quo and threw them out the door. He didn’t just skirt around their Maginot Line, he ploughed straight through it. And he’s challenged the nation’s politicians to do something about it.
The three key elements from Kloppers speech was that it was clear that Australia did need to take strong action to reduce its emissions, it needed to look beyond coal and towards other energy sources, and it needed to do so to protect its international competitiveness.
The need for global action on climate change is not, apparently, just a left-wing conspiracy. And it is now, once again, a front page issue.
“We do believe that such a global initiative will eventually come and, when it does, Australia will need to have acted ahead of it to maintain its competitiveness,” he said.

We’ll be watching the movements in Federal Policy with interest.

Join us on twitter for more latest cleantech news.

Addition: Follow story on Sydney Morning Herald called “Kloppers under fire on carbon tax” published Sept 17th AAP:

BHP chief executive Marius Kloppers’s call for Australia to act before other countries and introduce a carbon tax has put him at odds with many business leaders.
While big miners such as Rio Tinto and Xstrata, as well as the Minerals Council of Australia, went to ground yesterday, refusing to comment on whether they supported Mr Kloppers’s contribution to the debate, others were vocal in their concern, urging the government not to adopt Mr Kloppers’s ”one size fits all” climate policy.

What role will Australia’s play globally in cleantech sector in next 5 years? What are our strengths?

CleantechTV spoke with:
Fadi Geha – Managing Director at EcoView Technologies Ltd.
Marc Newson – Partner specialising in Cleantech & Carbon Markets at Ernst & Young
Tony St. Clair – Agri Business Manager at MBD Energy Ltd.
Stephen de Belle – Managing Director and CEO of Granite Power Ltd.

Join the conversation:
Join CleanTechTV on twitter
Australian Business Leaders Talk – Linkedin Group where you can connect with like-minded business leaders to discuss the issues and developments in the cleantech space.

What does your cleantech sector need to support its growth?

CleantechTV spoke with:
Stephen de Belle – Managing Director and CEO of Granite Power Ltd.
Tony St. Clair – Agri Business Manager at MBD Energy Ltd.
Fadi Geha – Managing Director at EcoView Technologies Ltd.
Marc Newson – Partner specialising in Cleantech & Carbon Markets at Ernst & Young

Join the conversation:
Join CleanTechTV on twitter
Australian Business Leaders Talk – Linkedin Group where you can connect with like-minded business leaders to discuss the issues and developments in the cleantech space.

From Australia:

“Big solar’s big potential”, Climate Spectator, 16th Aug

This week, the Australian Solar Energy Society joined the Australian Conservation Foundation in calling for an additional 5 per cent of Australia’s electricity to come from ‘big solar’ by 2020.
That target would see the generation of around 8,500 megawatts of large-scale solar, and the construction of more than 30 big solar plants around the country. It would also cut Australia’s carbon pollution by more than 240 million tonnes over the life of the projects.

“The wind farm that ate the RET” Climate Spectator, 13th Aug

In Australia’s renewable energy market, fortune favours the quick and the big.
The $1 billion Macarthur wind farm to be built in south-western Victoria is being touted as the most significant renewable energy project in Australia since the Snowy Hydro.
But don’t expect another project of similar ambition to follow anytime soon, even though there are a couple on the drawing board – there’s simply no room left in the market.
Macarthur has been a long time in the planning for AGL, it’s just been waiting for the opportunity provided by the passage of the Renewable Energy Target.

“How to be fully renewable in 10 years” Sydney Morning Herald, 13th Aug

AUSTRALIA could switch completely to renewable energy within a decade by building a dozen vast, new solar power stations and about 6500 wind turbines, according to a major new study.
The Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan – a collaboration between Melbourne University’s Energy Research Institute, the environment group Beyond Zero Emissions and engineers Sinclair Knight Merz, puts the cost at $37 billion in private funding and public investment every year for the next decade.

“Fossilised approach to power” – The Australian, 11th Aug

BOTH Labor and Coalition policy on carbon trading will damage Australia’s emerging renewable energy industry, leading scientists have warned.
Michael Dopita, co-editor of an Australian Academy of Science report on renewable energy, says Labor’s plan to delay the introduction of an emissions trading scheme and the Coalition’s plan to go without one will send some start-up companies developing renewable energy to the wall.

“Geothermal’s pressure test“, Climate Spectator, 11th Aug

Geodynamics has spent an estimated $300 million over the past decade on the development of its cutting edge hot dry rocks geothermal technology in the Cooper Basin. Some time in the next month or so it might find out if it has all been worth it.
It may seem overly dramatic to label the fracturing tests that will be undertaken at a single well over the next few weeks as a “make or break” for the company.
But that is the way it is being viewed by Geodynamics and its backers. Success will deliver the key to an estimated 6,500MW of clean, base-load power that could be brought to the grid over the next 10 to 15 years; failure will cause the company to undergo a major rethink of its ambitions.

“Ten climate policy ideas Julia or Tony could steal” ABC Environment, 9th Aug

Some might say the government and the opposition are lacking for ideas on climate change policy. ABC Environment has 10 good ones they could consider.
THE GOVERNMENT’S proposed emissions trading scheme never quite got off the ground. And with both major parties being attacked for a lack of strong policies on climate change, it would seem alternative ideas were thin on the ground in the party rooms. However, ABC Environment has scanned the globe for climate policies the next Australian Government could steal.

“Ambitious targets in greenhouse proposal” Sydney Morning Herald, 9th Aug

THE state government is developing a new plan to combat climate change and it says it can make deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions even if a proposal to build two new coal-fired power plants goes ahead.
The state’s old greenhouse gas targets have been thrown out and replaced by a far more ambitious agenda to cut emissions by at least 5 per cent by 2020, instead of just stabilising them by 2025.
This means the average carbon footprint of every person in NSW will have to be reduced by a hefty 27 per cent in the next 10 years, according to federal government estimates. The NSW Department of Climate Change, Environment and Water says the plan is realistic even if there is no national emissions trading scheme by 2013.

“A mighty wind – turbine power growth hit 40 per cent last year” Sydney Morning Herald, 9th Aug

Wind power generation across the eastern states grew by 40 per cent last year as several large farms began operating.
A Climate Group report on electricity generation and its emissions, covering all states except Western Australia, found 83 per cent of power used in 2009 came from greenhouse-intensive coal. Nine per cent was from renewable sources – mainly hydro power – and 8 per cent from gas.

From overseas:

“Ban announces high-level panel to tackle global sustainability issues” – The UN News Centre, 9th August

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today unveiled a new panel on global sustainability that is tasked with finding ways to lift people out of poverty while tackling climate change and ensuring that economic development is environmentally friendly.
“I have asked the Panel to think big,” the Secretary-General told reporters in New York today. “The time for narrow agendas and narrow thinking is over.”
To be co-chaired by Finland’s President Tarja Halonen and South African President Jacob Zuma, the 21-member High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability brings together representatives from government, the private sector and civil society in countries rich and poor.
It is essential, Mr. Ban said, to promote low-carbon growth and enhance resilience to climate change’s impacts, as well as to tackle the intertwined challenges posed by poverty, hunger, water and energy security.
“In short, we need a new blueprint for a more livable, prosperous and sustainable future for all,” he stressed.

“The Necessity of Smart Grids” RenewableEnergyWorld.com, 9th of Aug 2010

You could argue that smart grids are unnecessary and that traditional system reinforcement with copper and steel will do the job. I can’t argue the physics of that, but I can argue on the commercial side. I know of a utility that complains that 30 percent of its copper and steel is idle for 350 days of the year, only getting used during the peak of summer. And its forecast is that this will progressively get more extreme with time. To install more metal infrastructure for progressively shorter periods of peak demand is just not economically feasible.

“Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover” New York Times, 9th Aug 2010

Five years ago, the leaders of this sun-scorched, wind-swept nation made a bet: To reduce Portugal’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, they embarked on an array of ambitious renewable energy projects — primarily harnessing the country’s wind and hydropower, but also its sunlight and ocean waves.
Today, Lisbon’s trendy bars, Porto’s factories and the Algarve’s glamorous resorts are powered substantially by clean energy. Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year, up from 17 percent just five years ago.

Read the full article on Climate Spectator and the AuSES press release regarding their announcement last week.