Greenwire, January 3, 2008

NEW TECHNOLOGY GETS PUSH TOWARD MARKET

By Jenny Mandel, Greenwire reporter

A large-scale solar technology project demonstrated originally through the Department of Energy has gained momentum with new equity funding and the launch of a business unit to bring it to market.

Hamilton Sundstrand, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX), announced yesterday that it would apply engineering expertise from its aerospace and building systems businesses in a new venture called SolarReserve, aimed at commercializing a concentrated solar power technology (CSP) that stores energy for steady power generation.

HS Rocketdyne, another Hamilton Sundstrand subsidiary, worked with DOE to demonstrate a CSP tower structure that concentrates the sun's rays via reflectors onto a central tower equipped with a reserve of melted salt. The rays heat the molten salt to very high temperatures, and that heat can be used immediately to turn a turbine for electricity or stored for later generation.

The system, which takes advantage of heat transfer technologies from Rocketdyne's rocket engine systems as well as the company's work with molten salt, was first demonstrated at the Solar Two facility in Barstow, Calif., the company said.

Private equity funder US Renewables Group is the sole financing partner of the venture, according to SolarReserve spokesman Randy Steinberg, who declined to disclose the funding level.

Lee Bailey, managing director of US Renewables Group, compared the energy storage capability of the molten salt system to a hydroelectric power plant. "We will have the capability to store the sun's energy and release it on demand," he said. "This product is more predictable than water reserves, the supply is free and inexhaustible, and the environmental impact is essentially zero."

Steinberg said the first solar plants employing the technology could come online in late 2010 and would generate up to 500 megawatts of power during peak periods. It was not immediately clear whether SolarReserve would own and operate any plants it built.

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