Hi I'm about 11 hours from Sydney in Outback Australia complete with the Red Dirt I might show you that up close anyway. I'm here at a little tiny uh town called Wycliffe which is an old opal mining uh town and we're going to take a look at something really interesting. It's the world's first solar power station. Now that solar cell rubbish actual solar thermal power station, let's take a look at it and here it is.

We've got 14 5 meter diameter parabolic dishes with Uh covered with over 2 000 mirrors on each one. Each ones are individually tracking the Sun Not now because it's not operational anymore and opened in 1981 and supplied up to 25 kilowatts to the town of Wycliffe which was enough for the hospital and the shop and up to you know half a dozen homes or something like that. It's a very small town. there's not much here, but it was a really a big addition to the town.

It operated for over a decade until they actually reconnected the town, but at that point they actually uh converted this. They added solar panels to it and that doubled the capacity from 25 kilowatts up to 50 kilowatts maximum Peak airport and this was developed as a test installation by the Australian National University to test the viability of our concentrated solar thermal power generation. So they are designed and built. All of these are 14 dishes.

Here you can see see two arrays of seven each, but they're all individually tracking and they were. They had their own autonomous Uh tracking of the Sun but the reason that they pick white list. Not only is it a small Outback town, but it also has one of the highest solar insulations in the world. So and this produced up to 25 kilowatts Peak for over a decade.

So if you have a close-up look at the dishes here, you can see all the little individual collectors on there over 2 000 of these individual mirrors in a pallet parabolic dish which concentrates the solar into the head unit at the top. but this isn't the original unit there. it didn't actually have the guy post. it was a center structure which concentrated into a spiral wound heat concentrator that actually once the solar was focused in there.

So the solar concentrator on each one of these got anywhere from 500 to 1000 degrees Celsius and that would actually uh super heat steam in the pipes and then that would actually they had a steam. a specially built superheated steam turbine generator that produced up to 25 kilowatts. uh Peak And if you have a look at the facility here, unfortunately we can't get in there anymore. it is.

There's barbed wire fenced I could jump it but yellow. We've got some storage tanks up here which I presume would have been uh for the water. And here at the back of the dishes you can see that we've got this Hut here. and this is what contained not only the Uh Steam and the superheated steam turbine generator, but also the batteries as well.

They used our mining batteries because well, and batteries aren't like they are these days. So I guess mining batteries were the Ducks guts back then. But uh yeah. so they use those to supply power to the town at night and of course during the day it pretty much come from here in any excess energy would have gone into charge the batteries as well.

But yeah, unfortunately it's not open. They will are thinking about converting into some sort of, you know, tourist type thing, but unfortunately it doesn't look like that's uh happened. Although they've got some, you know, signage. but yeah, unfortunately it is a Heritage They do actually have a plaque and marker in there.

This is actually a heritage site so you're not allowed to uh, touch it anymore because yeah, it's important. You can still see the mirrors are actually uh in place there which is really cool. So the concentrated uh solar that would have been up in uh, this is the more modern stem for the uh, like the solar cell version of this thing and it looks like that one over there. You see the mirrors have started to fall off that one over there unfortunately, but it's still in pretty good condition like 40 years later.

So this was a real, quite remarkable for its time and it was the world's first concentrated solo. But then of course our solar panels got better and there's just no contest these days with uh, solar cells. Of course, of course, if you wanted to generate the Steam for you know, some other heating, they might still be useful I guess. And if we're talking about this thing in terms of efficiency, how good was it? Well, not that great.

We're only talking about uh 10 to 12 13. Something like that. Efficiency at best at Peak Remember I said this was only a 25 kilowatt maximum Uh Peak output power on this thing. and we're talking 14 dishes of five meters diameter each.

So compare that with like some people have on their homes, a 25 kilowatt home solar system. That'd be quite a large installation, but it's certainly not nearly as large as these 14 5 meter diameter dishes. So in terms of comparison to a modern solar cell array, it just it doesn't cut it at all. In fact, these actually were converted to our photovoltaic high Temperatures solar cells.

and that's what you can now see here at the moment with that three-legged strut. There that that single-ended uh, steam pipe uh, solar absorber that was replaced with these concentrated uh solar and they contain 16 water cooled up photovoltaic cells. So I'm not sure how that worked inside the box. I Don't really have any info on that, but these were converted over just to do research on high temperature um, photovoltaic cells and it upped the power output of this thing from 25 kilowatts up to 45 kilowatts.

So that wasn't too shabby. But in comparison to Modern solar cell arrays, it just it doesn't really cut it anymore. But if you want to break this down in terms of losses, where are all these losses occurring? If we're only getting like 10 to 12 percent output total output system efficiency? Well, if you consider a nominal Uh solar insulation of a thousand watts per square meter and that's the standard that all our solar cells read any solar cell data sheet and you'll find a thousand watts per square meter. So we use the same figure here.

Yeah, so a thousand watts per square meter? We've got a five meter diameter dish. but let's say of that, 1000 Watts uh per square meter. The actual reflection loss of the mirrors. That's going to account for about Uh 14 right there now.

Modern, uh, solar thermal plants. And they've got better mirror designs these days. They don't use a parabolic dish like this anymore. They actually use mirrors to go up to one Central uh tower now.

and here's a photo of modern plants and they can get into the megawatt, uh regions and the reflection efficiency of those mirrors that can be up to Uh 95 or so efficiency. But these ones, and they're only about 85 with this design. Back then and then, you've got uh, the absorber losses in that uh, piping absorber thing. That was about another 17.

And then you've got the all the duct in because you've got to run all the duct in. Um, to all these things. it's quite a long way between the dishes and the storage tanks and the generators and everything else. Uh, there was another four percent in or so.

and then you've got all the extra ducting and everything else. That was about another three percent loss. And then uh, that only gave us about, you know, just over 62 percent that actually made it into the generator room itself. and then the Uh generator, the steam generator.

That was only about, um, you know, up to 20 efficiency. but that would that could be as low as 10 depending on the solar insulation that day. The engine efficiency would actually change because the hotter it was, the more efficient the hotter the steam got, the more efficient that the engine could run. So you know on a really you know, a thousand Watts or Eleven Hundred uh, watts per square meter day, you know it'd really be getting up to, you know, just over peaking above 20 efficiency on your engine.

So 20 of that 62 and a half percent Bingo you only get your you know, 10 to 12 percent, uh, total system efficiency out of this thing. Then you've got a couple of extra losses in there. You've got the enthalpy of the feed water system that was like a couple of uh percent and then you've got the pump in power Of course to pump the water around, but that was only low. That was only you know, a point two percent or so.

but there's a couple of other, uh, little losses in there as well. But yeah, this overall system efficiency of you know, around about that 10 to 12 figure and which would get lowered get as low as like uh, four or five percent on like a really low solid insulation day. It doesn't really cut it, but hey, you know it generated useful power for this town for like a decade. So Isn't that cool? The world's first solar power plant.

Hope you found that interesting If you like me doing these uh sorts of Tours please give it a big uh thumbs up and I can do more of these things. but uh yeah, it's a shame we can't get into this one. But anyway, it's rather interesting that this thing is still here. and this was, uh, did important research back in the day to see if solar thermal was viable.

This one lasted for a little over a decade and then they went. Yeah, let's uh, solo, let's do what concentrated solar cell technology And then, yeah, that lasted uh for another decade or so before they decommissioned this thing. Anyway, I Hope you found that interesting as always. You can comment down below.

catch you next time and remember, don't forget to subscribe to the EV vlog and you know you're in our back. Australia When you find the Red Dirt look at that. Yeah, there's the bottom of my boot. Andy White Cliffs has a sporting club ironically with solar panels to power it and uh yeah.

Well, this is the uh cricket pitch here. This is the sporting oval and well, yeah, I've seen better. but uh, no, it's good enough for Australia And there's the dishes right in the background there. Fantastic huh? Ah, Australian Outback And ironically, the only Pub in town has a decent solar array.

Look at that! What a Bobby Dazzler!.