Extract from ABC News
About an hour south of Dubai — depending on the traffic that can often choke the streets of the Emirati capital — a giant tower rises like a beacon.
Glowing a blinding white that's almost painful to look at, the 250-metre-high construction looms over the flat, desert landscape for miles around.
But unlike so much of the colossal, conspicuous wealth that embodies the city nearby, this tower is not in aid of — or a tribute to — the fossil fuels that underpin the local economy.
It is, rather, a glimpse of a future where oil and gas aren't needed at all.
"This plant that we're standing in could power 450,000 Australian homes 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," says Keith Lovegrove, the head of the Australian Solar Thermal Energy Association.
"That's about the number of households in Brisbane, for example, in a site that's very much smaller than Brisbane."
Known as Noor Energy, the plant Mr Lovegrove refers to is the world's biggest solar thermal power plant.
These differ from conventional solar projects, which convert the Sun's rays directly into electricity via what are known as photovoltaic cells.
Solar thermal plants, by contrast, harness – or "concentrate" – the sun using special mirrors known as heliostats to generate temperatures of up to 565 degrees Celsius.
The heat melts an industrial type of salt, which is then stored before its energy is used to produce steam that can generate electricity through a turbine.
In the case of Noor Energy, the plant is actually comprised of four separate solar thermal plants which, collectively, cover an area equivalent to 6,200 football fields.
Mr Lovegrove says the plant's ability to store its energy is what sets it apart from many other forms of renewable energy.
"The real significance of that is the separate power plants that make up those 700MW have between 11 and 15 hours of energy storage built into them," he says.
"This means they can run at full power for 15 hours after the Sun has gone down.
"And this is what the world needs.
"We've built a lot of intermittent renewables, but we need to build a lot more of these dispatchable renewables … things with long-duration energy storage built in."
Mr Lovegrove visited the plant as part of an Australian delegation travelling to the United Arab Emirates for this year's UN climate talks.
Accompanying him on the trip was Kane Thornton, the chief executive of industry lobby group the Clean Energy Council.
Mr Thornton says solar thermal plants like Noor Energy are the type of thing Australia needs.
"This is an extraordinary example of an enormous solar project," Mr Thornton says.
"And I think what it does is it shows the scale of renewable energy generation that's possible and the sort of things we, frankly, need a lot more of these into the future if we want to get to net zero."
Solar thermal still yet to take off in Australia
Solar thermal technology has been used around the world for more than 30 years.
Despite this, there are no operating plants in Australia.
Darren Miller is the boss of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and he says there are some promising solar thermal companies operating in Australia.
Among them are RayGen, which has a pilot plant at Mildura near the New South Wales-Victoria border, and Vast Solar, which has been given money by the Australian government.
But Mr Miller notes there are reasons no commercial projects have yet got off the ground.
"It's technically difficult," Mr Miller says.
"It's not an easy thing to build a 250-metre-tall tower and have that all working at very high temperatures.
"And so I think the industry will acknowledge that cost is an issue.
"I think up to 9,000 people worked to build this project and that might be something you can do more easily in the UAE and other parts of the world than in Australia.
"We know we have shortages of labour and things are expensive to do in Australia."
Mr Lovegrove acknowledges costs have been a problem in the past.
Noor Energy alone cost $US3.8 billion ($5.7 billion).
He acknowledges that such an amount of money is a "tidy sum" that doesn't make solar thermal practical in all circumstances.
However, he notes the price being paid for the power from Noor Energy is the lowest ever for a solar thermal project.
And, in any case, he says headline costs don't give the full picture.
"Remember, when you build a plant like this there's no fuel costs," Mr Lovegrove says.
"If you want to compare to this to, say, a coal plant of the same size, well, the coal plant has a capital cost plus an ongoing fuel cost, not to mention the impact of the CO2."
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