AN innovative renewable energy power solution manufactured by Kalgoorlie-based Outback Energy Supply has won the 2010 People’s Choice Award in the final episode of the ABC’s New Inventors program.
AN innovative renewable energy power solution manufactured by Kalgoorlie-based Outback Energy Supply has won the 2010 People’s Choice Award in the final episode of the ABC’s New Inventors program.
The Outback Power Pack is the first solar and wind power system that can be installed on-site with any combination of solar, wind, and diesel.
Rather than installing solar panels on existing buildings or cementing wind turbines in the ground, the panels and turbines are mounted onto the outside of a shipping container-type structure, which then charges up batteries that are stored on the inside.
Inventor and principal of Outback Energy Supply, Jim Thomson, founded the renewable energy engineering company in 1999 and began ‘containerising’ the energy systems in 2005 to reduce the time spent installing the systems in remote locations.
“[Renewable energy systems] have always been done the same way – you go out there and put the stuff on the farmer’s shed,” Mr Thompson said.
“To me, coming from a mining background, the job always had to be done properly and it wasn’t good enough, so I wanted to take back some control of the quality of the job and to do that I needed to contain it.
“But I had issues in the past where we would install it, turn it on and it wouldn’t work or smoke would come out.
“Now it’s all tested in the workshop and it doesn’t leave until we’re happy with it. So when we take it to site, we’re confident that when we turn it on it will work right away.”
Mr Thomson told WA Business News the mounted wind turbine was the stand-out innovation, as excavations and concrete would have made the job more expensive.
“And it also reduces the carbon footprint of the Outback Power Pack because concrete is one of the highest carbon emitters out there,” he said.
Mr Thomson said the company had installed about 30 Outback Power Packs during the past five years, mainly to pastoralists and famers, and also to a growing number of ‘tree changers’.
To run an average home – and according to Mr Thomson, the majority of tree changers are building energy efficient homes – the pack comes in at less than $80,000.
“So for the price of a LandCruiser you can have a reliable power source for your home,” Mr Thomson said.
The patent-pending system has also won the support of an undisclosed Western Australian energy utility, which is trialling it for grid replacement and grid support. The utility is having a look at the technology to overcome intermittency issues for its remote customers.
While there are plans in place to expand interstate and overseas, Mr Thomson said the immediate focus was on putting solid procedures in place to enable contractors to build the containers in other locations, at the same high standard. Properly documented procedures would also boost production.
“At the moment we have a turnaround time of six weeks per container, so we’re going through the processes to get scale up the volume of orders,” he said.
“For example, we can build two side by side, but if we had an order for 10, 20 or 30 we’d be in trouble.”
Mr Thomson said innovative solutions, particularly in the renewable energy space, needed more support from state and federal governments as Australia had fallen behind other countries regarding the uptake of wind and solar projects.
In related news, Science and Innovation Minister Bill Marmion announced the finalists of the 2010 Innovator of the Year awards last week, a number of which are also working on energy efficiency.
Of the finalists, Bentley-based Metro Power Company has been nominated in the growth category for an innovative system that gathers data to predict the amount of electricity that will be used by industrial process plants and other large energy consumption sites.
And West Perth-based LNG Limited is in the running for the inaugural Woodside Oil and Gas Encouragement Award for its liquefaction process that has an overall efficiency 30 per cent greater than existing LNG production technology.
Winners will be announced on November 4.
