Another person chasing the solar dream is Gerry McGowan, chairman of CBD Energy, which has secured a contract to build a 99MW solar PV plant in Thailand at the cost of $300 million. The plant will support the grid around the tourist region of Pattaya, which is notoriously unreliable and relies heavily on more expensive diesel generation. The Thai government is offering a feed-in tariff of $US0.38/kWh, and CBD expects to generate a 15 per cent margin on its power purchase agreement with the local utility.
CBD is sourcing its panels from Chinese supplier Tianwei, which it also uses in Australia. The first stage of the project, 8MW, could be up and running as soon as next year. Such a project would be impossible under the current regime in Australia, McGowan says. He hopes the Thai project will give the company the profile to help it add similar projects elsewhere in Asia and in Europe. CBD is also working on a storage system and is about to start testing on a wind-based system using graphite in a pilot plant on King Island."
